Maybe you’ll understand what a UFC title fight means to a guy like Joseph Benavidez if I tell you that it wasn’t so long ago that he was fighting in bars in his underwear. I mean that literally.
Benavidez made his professional debut in a “kind of scary” New Mexico bar, and the trunks he wore in the fight were, if you want to get technical about it, a pair of briefs he bought at Target.
“I just thought they looked so good, no one would know,” Benavidez told me when discussing his MMA debut last August.