SAN DIEGO — Frank Mir knew what everyone was saying. He was thinking it, too.
The 36-year-old former UFC heavyweight champion lost a one-sided fight to Alistair Overeem at UFC 169, his fourth consecutive loss.
Most people in the business thought he should retire, and the question was first and foremost in his mind, as well.
“I really was,” Mir said at the UFC Fight Night 71 post-fight press conference. “After the Overeem fight, I kept asking myself, why do I keep putting my family through this?”
He instead decided to take some time off, adjust his approach and give it one more shot. And it’s paid off in 2015. Mir (18-9) needed just 1:13 to knock out Todd Duffee on Wednesday night at the Valley View Casino Center, giving him his second straight first-round knockout victory.
“I don’t think anyone will contest that among professional athletes, fighters are in a really selfish position,” Mir said. “I don’t mean that in a negative way. We have to put ourselves first in our training, and our loved ones really have to do the same. to go through all the hardship and the work we have to go through, the training, the physicality, the emotion, I was lucky, my wife told me to take the time off and recharge. I did, and I was able to keep going.”
Mir also admitted that somewhere along the way, he got a big head, an attitude he needed to lose.
“In my career, I went to one extreme where I listened to all the criticism everyone said, then I swung to another and I turned into a dick,” Mir said. “I was very off-putting when people tried to talk to me, I was really closed off. Now I’m somewhere in the middle.”
Mir, of course, isn’t the only heavyweight who has made a late-career resurgence. Fellow former champion Andrei Arlovski is also on a hot run. Mir says it just goes to show that you shouldn’t be too quick to write a fighter off.
“Andrei Arlovski, seven or eight years ago people were talking about him retiring worse than me, just because he had a couple 20-second knockouts,” Mir said. “Now he’s up there for a title shot.”