Frank Mir did not take his decision to come back lightly. After a unanimous decision loss to Alistair Overeem in February, the former UFC heavyweight champion gave himself plenty of time before he came to the conclusion that he would return to fighting.
Mir, who has lost four straight, told Ariel Helwani on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour that he did consider retirement for a time.
“I did if I wasn’t able to have a proper offseason and see where I could get my body’s level of fitness up to,” Mir said. “Then I would have considered it just because at that point I don’t want to go in there and have a bad performance, keep getting worse and worse. It wastes people’s money and at the same time it wastes time from my family. If you can’t perform at a high level or at least an optimal level, then it’s time you have to call it.”
But Mir said after taking some time off and speaking to those close to him, that the consensus was that he should continue competing.
“You take as much output from everybody around you, but I think that’s a decision you have to make on the inside,” Mir said. “I told everybody that I wasn’t going to make any decisions and just train without going left or right. Just train and be in shape and see how I felt.”
The 35-year-old Mir (16-9) will make his return against Antonio “Bigfoot” Silva at UFC 184 on Feb. 28 in Los Angeles. It’ll be yet another bout against one of the elite heavyweights in the world. Mir’s last four losses have come to Overeem, Josh Barnett, Daniel Cormier and Junior dos Santos.
“I haven’t fought the easiest opponents,” Mir said. “You can show up at your best and still not come out on top.”
One of the best heavyweight grapplers of all time, Mir is very confident in his ground game against the multi-dimensional Silva, also a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt. “Bigfoot” is coming off a knockout loss to Andrei Arlovski in September.
“I think he’s very confident with his ability on the ground, which is usually one of my best weapons,” Mir said. “When people are wary about fighting on the ground, I have a more difficult time. The fact that ‘Bigfoot’ feels he has a skill set [there] could work for me. It plays well into what I want to do.”
Mir also gave his opinion on the UFC’s controversial signing of former WWE star CM Punk, which was announced during Saturday’s UFC 181 event. Mir has some experience with professional wrestlers — he welcomed Brock Lesnar to the UFC in 2008 and later fought him again in the main event of UFC 100.
“I’m all for CM Punk becoming a part of the organization,” Mir said. “I think his background and training in martial arts, he should be capable of handling himself and doing well. And bottom line is, people are going to tune in to watch and that’s pretty much the bar of getting into the UFC, if you can sell tickets. It’s an entertainment sport to make money, so people are definitely going to tune in.”
As for the rumors of a Lesnar return, Mir is taking a conservative approach. While he said he would like a trilogy fight, he isn’t sure if Lesnar, the current WWE champion, will actually make an MMA comeback.
“They’ve been going on for a while now,” Mir said. “It’s one of those things now that when I hear it, I kind of shrug. OK. I’ll believe it when I see it.”