Filed under: UFC
Recently, I was talking with an insider of the sport about things unrelated to Saturday night’s UFC 117 middleweight championship fight, when the topic turned to Chael Sonnen for obvious reasons. After all, he is the most interesting man in the world, at least until early Sunday morning.
The insider, who has spent time with Sonnen in the recent past, began talking about Sonnen’s mental makeup, and some of the outrageous things he’s said in the leadup to his fight with Anderson Silva. The general wisdom holds that Sonnen said these things to drum up interest in the fight, or to get into Silva’s head, but he suggested another reason entirely. Sonnen, he insisted, felt a need to raise the stakes, to invest himself so deeply in the fight that he had no choice but to force himself into the performance of his life.
Sonnen himself has noted that he recently began studying sports psychology and had come to the realization that putting himself in uncomfortable situations and overcoming them seemed to result in an expectation of success. It’s a bold, all-in strategy that has upped the entertainment level of the promotion, but will it result in a charged fight?