Kevin Jairaj-USA TODAY Sports
Maybe ‘The Gorilla’ needs to move up in weight. Or maybe he just needs to stop eating garbage outside of camp?
Darren Till had a pretty amazing 2017 and 2018, winning four fights in a row and receiving a massive push from the UFC as they attempted to turn the unique Liverpool personality into another UK superstar. But it all came crashing down near the end of that year with a one sided submission loss to then-champ Tyron Woodley, followed by a bad knockout loss to Jorge Masvidal in front of his home country crowd in March of 2019.
Now Till is taking some time off to get his head straight and sort out the next segment of his career. ESPN’s Brett Okamoto caught up with Darren’s longtime coach Colin Heron to find out what the plan is, and where his fighter’s head is after a two fight slump. The full article is worth a read, and it sounds like Till and his team realized his chaotic personal life outside the cage has been hurting his performance in it. Till likely won’t return until October or November. In the meantime he’s deleted social media and gotten himself a mental health coach.
Most interesting to us, though, is discussion about Till’s weight. He’s a huge welterweight and has enjoyed the advantages that come with that. But the cuts only seem to be getting harder, leading many to expect he’ll need to move to middleweight imminently. But Heron told ESPN that may not be the case. If Till stops ‘eating s**t,’ he could stay at 170 pounds for the foreseeable future.
”It’s hard for me to make correct decisions, until I see a fighter, especially Darren, walking around lean between fights,” Heron said. “Here’s the problem with Darren Till, and it’s no secret: He eats s**t. As disciplined as he is in the gym, between fights, he will eat the most amount of s**t you’ve ever seen in your life.”
”The fact of the matter is he will probably be a middleweight, but whether it’s now or later, I don’t know,” he continued. “My only concern is he goes up to middle, and that will give him the license to eat more. Then we end up with just as big of a cut, but with bigger consequences in the actual fight. So, I would like to get him lean and then make a decision.”
It sounds like there’s a lot of room for improvement in Till’s diet, and considering how few fighters tend to thrive at higher weightclasses it seems like an obvious area to improve on before giving up that size advantage at welterweight.