UFC welterweight fighter Johny Hendricks spoke with Bleacher Report’s Gregory Chase about his background, his beard and his battles.
GC: Let’s start with how you got into MMA. What drew you into this sport and when did you decide this is something you wanted to do?
JH: After I lost my senior match, I wasn’t sure I still wanted to wrestle, but I knew I was still young enough to compete. I said to myself ‘Man, what am I going to do with my life?…I prayed about it, and a week within praying my manager called me. He was like, ‘Hey, would you like to be an MMA fighter?’ and I was like ‘Eh…I don’t know.’. He was like, ‘Well, I’m pulling some people out to Vegas if you want to try it out.’ I was like, “Okay, I’ve watched it…I don’t know anything about MMA, but I know how to wrestle….okay, let’s try it out.’ So I went out there and I did okay for knowing what I knew, and I came back and it just didn’t click with me, you know? It didn’t click at that point. So I prayed about it for about another three weeks, and then my manager called me and said, ‘Hey, we’re going out to Vegas again, want to come?’ I said okay, so I flew out to Vegas for the second time and that’s when I got knocked out. I got knocked out and I didn’t wake up until the next day and I was thinking to myself, ‘The worst-case scenario just happened to me…I got knocked out, there’s nothing I can do about it.’ And I felt great, so I was like, ‘You know what, let’s try this…that’s not going to happen again.’ That’s what I told myself. I don’t want to get knocked out again, so let’s learn some stuff. [laughs]
GC: Now your first professional fight was back in 2007. You have 13 fights so far. Where have you seen the biggest evolution or growth in your game over your career so far?
JH: The best thing that could’ve happened to me was that I learned a lot in Vegas, but I didn’t know how to implement it. Whenever I came to Texas, all we had was Marc Laimon, jiu-jitsu coach. We didn’t have a striking coach. So me and him started to just develop our own game, because he knows nothing about striking. We sat down and we sort of found my style. I think that was the best thing that could’ve happened to me. Coming out of here, not having anyone to correct me every single second, I sort of found my own style…and whenever I found it, when people would call me in for a week, they would try to correct the style. They were trying to correct it, but what I was doing is I would say, ‘Okay, well, let’s do your way of fighting.’ I’ll feel a couple things out and see if that works for me. If it works for me, as I’m doing it myself, that’s whenever I’ll add it into my game. You see what I’m saying? I became my own striking coach in a sense.
GC: You just mentioned in the beginning stages of your career that you prayed on a lot of things. How big is religion or your spirituality part of your life and your career?
JH: Extremely. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t make it to every Sunday [laughs]. If I’m in town, I try to go every Sunday, you know, we got a good church group down here. It’s everything. I know that I wouldn’t be where I’m at if it wasn’t for God. I know that I could be an athlete. Everybody has a talent. I believe if you pray…I’m not a fan that you’re going to win every single match, I don’t believe he’s going to go in there and help me win. What I pray for every fight is to let me go out there and let me fight to the best of my abilities, and to keep us both safe. That way, we can wake up and do it again. It’s something I want to really, really keep doing, because it’s easy to sit here in this room and say, ‘I got myself somewhere.’ I just don’t believe that. Fighting lives and dies, you can’t fight forever. So whenever I leave, I want people to come up to my family whenever I retire and say, ‘Man, he was a great person.’ You know what I mean? ‘He did this, he did that, but not only that but he was just a great person.’ That’s what I want, I want people to come up to my family and say those kind of words. Not just that he was a great fighter.
GC: You are coming off a fantastic knockout of Jon Fitch. First fan question is from Joe Forman: How did it feel to knock out the guy who was well-recognized as the No. 2 guy at welterweight in the world?
JH: Oh, it felt amazing! You know? [laughs]. We saw holes like that in his game, but you don’t know if that’s going to happen. I was talking to someone the other day, and he was like, ‘If I fought for a living and I knocked someone out, I would just walk away and act like I knew it was supposed to happen…I wouldn’t be celebrating or this or that.’ Man, you can go into that ring thinking you’re going to knock someone out…it ain’t going to happen! It hardly ever happens the way that you want it. I was like, ‘You’ll probably end up going in there and getting knocked out!’ Now if you just win, you don’t see people running around celebrating off of a win, they tried to manipulate the judges, but they’re not running around like they did something great. So it’s always nice to be able to train as hard as you can and sometimes have the ability to finish a fight.
GC: The second is from Mark Solanki, who asks: Was beating Jon Fitch your biggest achievement in MMA to date?
JH: Yeah, of course. I think, more or less, my first fight might beat that. You know what I’m saying? The first fight…that means you’re gonna do it. Because that first fight is so terrifying because you don’t know what to expect. You can train in 16-ounce gloves, but as soon as you’re hit with 4-ounce gloves, that’s when you know you’re either going to fight or you’re not. That was my first steppingstone.
GC: The last fan question, from Sean Rains, was if you remember the guys at the Oklahoma Bait and Tackle Show who screamed out the window of their car “You knocked out Jon Fitch. Thank you!!”?
JH: Yeah I do remember that guy! It was so weird, because we were walking about 50 yards from the entrance and all of a sudden he said that. I looked over and said, ‘Hey, thanks man! He was driving off, so you don’t get too much of that. But yeah, I don’t remember what he looks like, but I remember that. That’s pretty funny!
GC: Who would you say was your toughest opponent in your career so far? You have the loss to Rick Story, but was he the toughest or most challenging?
JH: Actually the toughest fight I’ve ever had was T.J. Grant. Not many people got to see that fight. First off, T.J. is a tough, tough dude! You know how you get those feelings that things aren’t going to click right? But you have to go out there and win, because you only get one shot every four months to prove you can win. So I was sitting there and walked to the cage, and he broke my nose within the first like minute and a half of the fight. I was like, ‘Son of a gun!’ I hit him with a couple good shots, but to my surprise he kept coming at me. That was a hard-fought three0round battle. I think that was one of my toughest to overcome. Actually, I got two, Alex Serdyukov in WEC, my last fight. I broke my hand in the second round, and I had to go into the third round and just get beat on for five minutes, and that’s never fun. My left hand was broke and I didn’t know too much about striking and how to set up everything else. If I had known what I know now, I maybe could’ve won the third round, but heck no, I couldn’t do anything but sit there and get pounded on…that sucked! [laughs]
GC: Now Rory Macdonald just had an impressive win at UFC 145. Is he someone you might be interested in fighting to determine the next No. 1 contender? If so, how do you think the fight would go?
JH: Hopefully, you know this is hopefully, I gotta go out there and win first, but hopefully this fight puts me where nobody else is. You know, where I’m the No. 1 contender no matter what. Because let’s be honest, who’s beaten Fitch? There was only one guy to beat Fitch. Two, who has beaten Fitch and Josh Koscheck? There’s only been one guy who has been able to do that, too, because if one guy beats one, the other one ends up winning. You know what I’m saying? So if I can go out there and do a good performance against Josh Koscheck and win, then I think that’s something no one else has done except for GSP. So I think that deserves a shot itself.
GC: Who would you be more interested in to fight for the belt? GSP or Carlos Condit?
JH: Well, both. I don’t know, whoever has it. Right now it’s Carlos Condit because GSP is out. Like I said, I gotta get through this one. If I get through this one, I’m going to be campaigning for that. We don’t know how long GSP will be out, and the belt can only be on standby for so long. That’s my goal, to get a shot at it, because that’s why I’m here.
GC: Now you have a strong collegiate wrestling background. How do you think your wrestling would fare against someone like Georges St. Pierre?
JH: I think great [laughs]. I understand wrestling. I understand what keeps people away from the legs. And that’s something I’ve started trying to develop in my game. Not only how to take people down more efficiently, but how to keep people away from your legs as well. My last three fights, and now this will be the fourth one, have all been wrestlers. So now I’m getting to develop a game to keep people away from me. If I want to take someone down, okay, I understand that, I need to do this and this. How do I keep people from even wanting to attempt the takedown? And so that’s something I’m developing right now, and I developed for Fitch, but I’m starting to get to where I know I’m going to have to use it for this fight, I do believe.
GC: PED’s and TRT are issues in MMA, especially recently. What are your thoughts on these in MMA?
JH: I don’t even take muscle milk these days! [laughs]. You know what I mean? The only thing I take is Glutamine. I want to win it knowing that I won it. I don’t’ want to win it knowing that I juiced up, and that it helped me get through my training camps and maybe a little bit stronger. I want to make sure that I win it with all-natural ability. That’s just me. Everybody is a little bit different, but I just want to do it this way, and I want to make sure that I get my hand raised at the end of the day knowing that there’s nothing I have to worry about. You know? If the UFC said we have to drug-test you today, I would say, ‘Okay, where do I have to pee?’ That’s something I don’t have to fear about ever. Those are nice things not have to worry about.
GC: An iconic image of you is your beard. It is something you plan on keeping in the future?
JH: Oh yeah! Oh yeah, I love the beard! I was grocery shopping yesterday and this guy came up to me and goes, ‘Man, that beard is AWESOME! I love it!’ and I was like, ‘Thank you, man!’ and my wife looked at me and goes, ‘Man, I hate people like that.’ [laughs] because she does NOT like the beard. It is who I am, and if I shave and came into the Octagon, people would be like, ‘Who’s this guy filling in for Johny?’ One thing that’s nice is that after my fight, whenever I shave, if I want some downtime, I can keep shaving for a couple of weeks…and whenever I go to restaurants and stuff, nobody will look at me. I’m just another regular person, but as soon as I get two or three weeks of growth, people will start doing a double-take. About a month and a half of growth, everybody’s like, ‘Oh, that’s Johny!’ [laughs].
GC: It’s like Superman with his glasses.
JH: Exactly! The only difference mine takes a month and a half [laughs].
GC: Do you have any plans on growing it even bigger?
JH: You know, I’ve thought about growing it out to where I can braid it. A lot of my friends like to watch Sons of Anarchy. Also Game of Thrones, one of the guys of the horsemen clan, he’s got a beard with rubber bands; just one big braid downwards. I was like ‘That’s pretty SWEET!’ I don’t know if I could ever pull that off. So yeah, I might grow it out a little bit longer. It also depends, because it’s the summer time too. It’s getting really hot right now, and hot sucks with the beard.
GC: What about the nickname “Bigg Rigg,” where did that come from?
JH: I drive a big F-350. It’s a dually. I put Ranch Hand front bumpers on it so it sticks out about another 12 inches. Then I put Ranch Hand bumpers on the back side too, so that way if anybody rear-ends me…I guess these things are supposed to take a hit at 40-45 miles per hour without crushing. So every-day driving, if someone rear ends me at 40 mph, they’re going to have a ton of damage, but nothing is going to happen to my truck. If I happen to do that to someone else, it will cave their car, and I don’t have to do any work on my vehicle.
GC: And then the beard can act like an airbag.
JH: There ya go! [laughs] We’re starting to get it down to where I’m pretty much invincible in my vehicle.
GC: If I’m not mistaken, you have a bachelor’s degree in secondary education. Were you going to be a teacher? If so, what were you going to teach?
JH: I wasn’t going to teach, I was trying to coach college. But if I had to teach, it didn’t really matter, whatever I had to go to school to get, any curriculum I needed to do, because you never know if you’re going to get a college coaching job or not. It was something I was looking at doing. So I sort of left it open. If I wanted to get a history major, for example, I would have only had to have 25-30 hours. It would all be history stuff. I had basics in anything you could teach, and all I’d have had to do was go back to school for a little while, like a year or two years, and I could be teaching high school anywhere.
GC: What was the best advice you were ever given, or any mottos you live by?
JH: Yeah, got a couple. One, treat everyone the way you want to be treated. I think that’s the most important one. Two, there’s always someone working harder than you. My dad told me a long time ago ‘You can goof off, you can do anything you want to when you’re 18-21 or 25, 30 years old. You can do the same exact stuff when you’re 40, when you’re 50. You don’t get a second chance to be 20.’ I was like, ‘You know what, I know what you’re trying to say.’ So I didn’t party a lot. Yeah, I drank, but I didn’t do a lot of partying. I was thinking to myself, ‘You know what, my dad is right.’ I can’t always be in college. I don’t get a four-year redo to be a college national champion. So that’s one of the most important things I learned was, ‘Do you want to work every day of your life and bust you butt and make a decent living? Or do you want to go to college and sacrifice 4-5 years of your life to where you can make better money with less work?’
GC: Is there any other fighter you really enjoy watching fight?
JH: I like watching Jon Jones. I mean, I rooted against him for this last fight, because everyone was picking Jones, you know? I wanted to see if Evans could pull it off. And Jones is a talented fighter. So I like watching him, Anderson Silva…great head movement. Pretty much any fight that you can name, any fighter I enjoy to watch. Because if they did something good, then I can look at them and say, ‘Okay, they did something good…awesome, let’s see if that works for me.’ If they did something bad, then I say, ‘Rewind it, how did they do that badly? Why did it end up causing this?’ You just sit there and dissect every fight. I wasn’t always this way, but about a year and a half ago I started being this way, and it helps a lot.
GC: If you could fight one fighter outside of your own weight class, who would it be and why?
JH: Ooo…man. I don’t know! They’re so tough! The people I look up to and would like to fight, they’re all freakin’ tough! Am I on the same level as them? I don’t know, but like I said, I like watching Jon Jones. I don’t think it would be a fun fight for me, but do I think I could win it? I don’t know, I doubt it! What, I’m 5’9’’, he’s 6’4’’? I have a 70-inch reach, he has an 84.5? So that wouldn’t be fun [laughs]. But hypothetically, those are the guys you want to fight. Whenever I look at them, I’m like, ‘Man, that would be fun to fight that guy!’ because you know if you’re fighting that guy, you’re making it…or you did make it.
GC: There was the great video of you and Brendan Schaub getting tied up and Schaub’s phone got put in the blender while you watched. Was it actually his phone? He looked pretty upset.
JH: Oh yeah! That was actually his phone, and he was INFURIATED! Infuriated! Oh it was so funny, he was like, ‘Where were you at on that one?!’ I was like, “uhh…I’d hate to mess up everything…you know…uhh..” [laughs]. I was like, should I untie him? Should I not? He [Schuab] might kill the guy, that’s how pissed he was.
GC: And, of course, it was quite a sight to see you and Schaub doing ballet together. How did you feel being called a terrorist over and over again by the instructor?
JH: [Laughs] I hear terrorist all the time! The greatest one was ‘Jihad.” That’s when I lost it. Whenever she went, ‘You make me sick, Jihad,’ I was sitting there stretching and that’s when I lost it. I was like, ‘Jihad, I haven’t heard that one before…well put, well put!’ Stuff like that makes me laugh, and if it makes me laugh, it’s gotta make everybody else laugh!
GC: So if you and Brendan had to compete on Dancing with the Stars, which one of you would win?
JH: Oh! Did you SEE my moves? Did you see my moves?! I got Dancing with the Stars in the bag! [laughs] I got coordination! That ballroom dancing stuff, the only thing that would help me out is that my shoulders don’t sag. So whenever I walk my shoulders are pretty much level at all times. So whenever these guys do this form, all I have to do is raise my arms up, and my shoulders are in the perfect form, so I could take him! [Schaub]
GC: Could you take on Chuck Liddell on the dance floor?
JH: Oh man, I don’t know. He’s been through it, you know? If I had a couple of sessions, I don’t know. That would be pretty fun. It would pretty fun to see if I could out-dance Chuck Liddell! He did pretty good, didn’t he? He did pretty good. Once again, if you’re competing with him, you’re in there! [laughs]
GC: It would be kind of cool if they did a Dancing with the Stars: UFC edition!
JH: That would be pretty funny, I would like to see who is the worst dancer of the UFC!
GC: Lastly, let’s get some predictions from you on upcoming fights. First off, how about Junior Dos Santos vs. Frank Mir?
JH: Junior Dos Santos. Might be knockout.
GC: How about Anderson Silva vs. Chael Sonnen?
JH: Ooo. I think Chael figured something out. Anderson is always adapting, so is he going to be able to adapt where he doesn’t get taken down as much? And Chael hits hard, he’s grown very well as a fighter. I remember watching him in the WEC, and he was sort of one-dimensional. Good ground game, good ground and pound, but not that great on the feet. All of a sudden he started throwing good punches and stuff like that, and he’s developing very well. I don’t know, but I think I’m going to have to go with the wrestler, though.
GC: How about the rematch between Benson Henderson and Frankie Edgar?
JH: I’m gonna go out on a limb and say Benson again. He’s got really good cardio. He’s really fast. Every time I root for Frankie…you know I’ve rooted for him once, and he lost, and every time I root against him he always wins. So I’m guessing Benson Henderson, for one, is fast and he’s a 155-pounder and I think Frankie Edgar is a 145-pounder.
GC: How about the rematch between Demetrious Johnson and Ian McCall?
JH: Oh man, I don’t know. I don’t know. It was a tough fight the first time. I don’t know on that one. Let’s just go Johnson.
GC: Last but not least, who wins in the epic battle between Johny Hendricks vs. Josh Koscheck?
JH: Ha! You know, of course, I gotta pick me. I believe I got everything it takes to win that fight. I’ve trained my butt off for the last three months. The training has been great, my focus has been great. Now all I need to do is get in there. No, it’s all the fun stuff. My training is about to be over this week. I cannot wait. Now that I’m with Mike Dolce, the weight cut is easy. Like right now, I’ve already lost 10 pounds without doing anything. I’m still eating six times a day, drinking a gallon and a half of water and my weight is coming off easy. So I’m pretty excited. I can’t wait!
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