UFC 143 was the biggest night of Carlos Condit‘s MMA career as the former WEC welterweight champion made history by knocking off Nick Diaz to become the interim UFC welterweight champion.
The decision which saw all three judges score the bout for Condit has been met with much controversy and even many fans in attendance were quick to boo the new champion who had just handed Diaz his first loss since 2007, but the “Natural Born Killer” doesn’t believe that the bout was as controversial as it’s being made out to be.
“I punched Nick Diaz in the face and hit him with harder shots,” Condit told MMAFighting’s Ariel Helwani in a post-fight victory. “I was able to take him out of his game. I won the fight.”
The judges didn’t see the fight exactly the same as one another, but while all agreed that Condit won, none of them agreed with how Condit himself would have scored the fight.
“I felt I won the first four [rounds] decisively,” he said. “If I lost that last one, it’s because he took me down and had my back for a little while towards the end.”
Though he took some damage and it seemed to most like he was struggling early in the fight, Condit believes that he had the match where he wanted it all along and that he was just setting things up for later in the fight.
“I kind of laid the ground work in those first rounds, hitting him with leg kicks, slowing him down, taking his mobility away from him,” he explained. “By taking that aspect of his game away, I was able to open up a lot more [later in the fight].”
Condit also revealed that while he didn’t want it to get out prior to the fight, he has actually been battling a pretty nasty cold leading up to the fight.
“I’ve been under the weather for the past two weeks,” he said. “Before I came out to Vegas, I was pretty sick. I’ve had a chest cold and all this week, I’ve been hacking stuff up. But I’ve been sick. I had a cold, but I’m not going to let that deter me from doing what I came out here to do.”
Now 28-5 in his MMA career, Condit is riding high on a five-fight UFC winning streak and has now won 13 of his past 14 bouts. However, while he hasn’t ruled out another fight between now and then, the likely eventual showdown with Georges St-Pierre will be the toughest test of his career thus far.
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