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Ideally, I want to get out of the sport at least when I'm 30-31. I don't want to be one of those guys who stays around too long, so I want to get as many fights in as I can.
My comfortability is always going favor the grappling side, that's the path of least resistance. But, I don't need necessarily need to force the takedowns like I used to before.
I tell myself, 'You're too fast, you're too strong, you're too quick. You can't be broken, you can't be beat. If you can't be broken, you can't be beat.' And I just beat it into my head.
If I'm only fighting once or twice a year, that's just not going to be enough to make a dent in the sport or enough financially for me to get myself to where I want to be and position myself.
It's interesting to see all these guys keep calling me out after they win. I don't know whether it's a slap in the face or just respect. I don't know. I have no idea. I can't tell what to make of it.
When you look at the U.S., it's a little weird, man because we have so many other sports and other things that we can watch and support that it's hard to get the support of an entire country around you.
I'm in this sport to change my life. I'm in this sport to change my parents' lives and the loved ones around me. That's really what I care about. And I can't do that if they keep putting me on these prelims.
If you're a sports fan and you're home and you're washing dishes, usually your TV is on ESPN and you're just getting the highlights and keeping up-to-date with all of the sports going around, all of the news.
I had to learn to toughen up and fend for myself. You'd think when you have a lot of brothers and sisters, they'd come to your aid and rescue you a lot of times, but for us it wasn't really like that. It was tough love.
At the end of the day, when you get a sponsor, it's a working relationship. So anyone I get involved with, I want it to be a working relationship where I'm generally trying to help them and they're generally trying to help me.
Just like any other job, you want a raise you've got to put in the work and you've got to show that you're deserving and what you bring to the table and all kinds of other stuff to show that you're worthy of so and so pay scale.
Obviously, I rep Jamaica. I'm a first generation born Jamaican-American. My parents are born and raised in Jamaica, my grandparents are born and raised in Jamaica, my other family still lives in Jamaica, and I still go back there.
I'm a hard guy to hit and take down, and once I get you on the ground I'm going to choke you out. Even if you resist a few of the other attempts I'm going to get you one way or the other. I'm like the Boogeyman... I'm gonna get you.
I hope we can figure out the reforms, educate and really retrain our police officers. Getting people to understand that just because I grew up a different way and my lifestyle's different, doesn't mean that you need to be afraid of me.
This is the weirdest thing. I've been told one thing, that all these guys turned me down, x,y, z. I take to Twitter and some of these guys are like, 'Yeah, I'll take the fight,' then you don't hear anything of it for the next few weeks.
I think everyone is kind of an immigrant somehow, and I wasn't raised in an American society at home. My household was a Jamaican household, so I got all my traditions, all my roots and culture intact, so I'm able to support both countries.
We're all fighting for a reason. We're not fighting to just fight. There's got to be some type of reward at the end of the rainbow and that reward is a big, shiny, UFC gold belt. That changes every fighter's life dramatically for the better.
I'm like, 'Man, if I'm going to have this idle time, I might as well be in school, do something positive where I'm not just wasting my prime years and not getting something else in return.' If I'm in school and training, that's OK. I did that in college. It worked.
I'm from a family of 20, so I'm one of the oldest guys, I grew up a lot having my brothers and sisters walk with me to school when I had to be the guy to watch them and all these things, so I kinda learned how to develop those leadership skills at a very early age.
If we're just going to have contenders fighting just to fight, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Then I might as well just start jumping around divisions too because there's a lot of fun fights for myself in other divisions that I think I would love to entertain.
Unfortunately, we don't have the luxury of being paid like NBA, NFL and soccer and baseball athletes. They have that cushion where they can kind of hang out. Even the guys on the bench. But for us, we don't fight, we don't get paid and that's the scary reality to it all.
You change the mind and world of one individual and that's huge, man. You reach one person and that starts a spiral effect and starts to snowball. I think that's the one thing as an athlete we should all focus on doing and that's striving to give back in a positive manner.
I think it's huge to set a good example. Whether you like it or not, as a professional athlete you are always going to be projected out into that spotlight of judgement. People are always going to judge every single thing we do and I think it's cool to just be real with yourself.
Fighters don't just fight. Not the good ones who have long, long success. The guys who make championship runs. The guys who fight for world titles. They get fizzled out, chewed up and spit out like a revolving door and then the next guy or the next female comes in to take their spot.
There's a lot of American citizens out there that do jobs that they hate, day in and day out. For me to do what I love to do, with people that I like and enjoy being around who are chasing the same dream, same passions, to have that around you day in and day out, I think it says a lot.
I think they need to start doing cageside weigh-ins again. I think that's the best way to go if you really want to see some difference. Cageside weigh-ins; I guarantee you won't see people cutting more than five to eight pounds, and they'll be fighting closer to their natural weight class.
It's almost out of sight out of mind because there's so many cards. One great fight could happens one weekend and another great fight happens next weekend, you kind of get swallowed up in that pack. So you have to find a way to separate yourself and what better way to do that than on ESPN?
Do you think the UFC is going to owe you a favor when you step up on short notice when nobody else is doing it? There's a reason a whole bunch of us aren't doing it. If you want to be that scapegoat, and think that the UFC's going to owe you one, good luck with that. Let me know how that goes.
Even when I teach my MMA classes in the gym, it's hard to teach what I do. It's more of state of flow, a state of feel. It's not a robotic thing like one, two, three, kick, one, two, three, switch, jab, cross. It's completely unorthodox. Everything is about rhythm, tempo and pace. It's a different style, man.
MMA is not one of those up and down basketball seasons where you have a ton of games and you can still make the playoffs. It doesn't work like that in MMA. You get a couple losses, you get washed up, you get the door slammed behind you and they bring in the next person behind you who is here to take your place.
I almost want to ask the judges, 'If you don't count leg kicks, if you don't count body kicks, why not?' So if you don't think they're effective in the scoring criteria, they're not effective striking, effective grappling, so how about I kick you in the body, I kick you in the leg, and you tell me how that feels?
You don't have to get into, 'I'm a leftist or a rightist, I'm Democrat or Republican.' You don't have to get into that kind of nitty gritty type of detail, but at the same time to show that you do have a stance is very, very important. To preach the good word of just being a good human being, being a humanitarian.
If you go into a negotiating room and are like, 'Well I was on the same card as Conor McGregor, so maybe I should get a little bit more money,' they'll probably just look at you like, 'What? In what universe does that even make sense?' So I don't see how anyone could possibly think it's going to be a trickle-down effect.
Being a wrestler, it can get rough in terms of your mindset, just having that mentality embedded in you where you just wanna go, go, go, 100 miles per hour, always redlining your body and never actually taking the time out to let your body recover the right way. As I got older, I started to realized that less sometimes is more.
If you're a UFC guy, if you're a company guy, if the company likes you, they're gonna do the right thing, in terms of promoting you. They're gonna promote who they want, they're not going to promote the people they think can't get to that next level and can't help bring the company a lot more money and bring them into other avenues.
What many fans don't realize with fighters, this is our job. But at the same time outside of this, we have regular lives where we do the same things that everybody else does. We have the problems. We get speeding tickets, we get pulled over, we have family issues, we have girlfriend issues, we have issues amongst ourselves, self doubt.
It's a little bit of a shame when I see some fans saying, 'Can you do me a favor and not ask questions to the fighters or the athletes about political stuff, cause we don't care about their opinions, we don't want to hear that, this is not that platform, if we wanted to hear that we would turn to CNN or FOX or ABC,' or whatever the case may be.