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I broke people's bones, tore muscles, ribs, faces, inflicted some serious and heavy damages to my opponents, etc... I got hurt myself, too, from serious attacks.
I'm not the kind of fighter who just hates each other before the fight. I can talk to you until one minute before the fight, and then I will take your head off if I can.
Saying that fights in Japan were fixed and that me, along with other guys like Silva, Minotauro, etc., did not win those fights legitimately is an ultimate and absurd nonsense.
I'm not allowed to be woken up under any circumstances except if my house starts burning. Then my wife is authorised to wake me up, but only if fire gets to the door of my room.
Training is not the key. Head is the key. For me, it's head. How aggressive you will be. Who will attack first? But you need to be good in your head, and there will be no problem.
I need to raise my kids. It takes a lot of time and a lot of energy to raise kids and make men of them these days. I don't want them to be lazy and just spend their father's money.
Sooner or later, the time comes when a man has to think on the health. I had a really long and great career, and I believe I left a deep mark in the martial arts. I have no regrets.
I'm a guy who likes to have fun, and I like everything normal people like, but I am always quoted before the fight when I'm jet-lagged and focused. In everyday life, I am different.
I usually train twice a day, and Thursdays and Sundays are supposed to be my days off. But even on those days, I'm training at least once. I have to do at least one session each day to be happy.
For my whole career, I didn't have sparring partners. I was frustrated when I came to the UFC because, after a few minutes of the first round, I would feel dead because I had no sparring partners.
People ask me if I'm going to open a school. Why not? I think I should. Maybe not a typical school where anyone can come but with young fighters definitely one day. I don't have the nerves for amateurs.
I am aware that I have come to the end of my martial times, but training with pain I want no longer. My body is battered by countless trainings. I collected nine operations; the body has become prone to injury.
The biggest shock was the first fight. I didn't know what to expect. I fought Fujita. At that time, he was one of the most dangerous PRIDE fighters. He was a complete beast and with 130 kilograms of pure muscle.
Training, and every morning I have to take my dogs out into the forest. That's all I'm doing. I'm staying out of everything else. All other things that can take out my concentration and my energy from the training.
I had 33 kickboxing fights, 37 MMA fights, plus 44 amateur boxing fights, which most of them were international. I will keep fighting as long as I feel good, but I will repeat once more, any fight could be the last one.
It was a mistake of mine to train like that, with friends, at home. It was a handicap I should not have given myself. In Croatia, we do not have big camps like in other countries, but I was not willing to go away to train.
I had it on my mind that I will fight in Cologne, because UFC is coming to Germany, where the biggest and largest Croatian community lives there. It was my big, big, big wish to participate. Even my doctor didn't believe I will make it, but I did.
People say people who spend too many years in prison don't know how to act when they get free. I don't know how I am going to act, how I am going to kill time, once I am not a fighter. Retirement scares me, and I have to think about how I am going to handle it.
I think it's stupid to say a guy who has trained in jiu-jitsu for as long as I have is just a stand-up fighter. I have trained with some of the best black belts in the world. I am comfortable on the ground. I can fight wherever the fight goes and not be concerned.
Now I am training with sparring partners who are nice people, sure, but not my friends. These are sparring partners who want to knock me out in sparring. In the Croatian media, they said it was 'life and death' sparring - it was not quite life and death, but it was all-out fighting, very hard.
I'm not angry or anything at Sonnen, but I will say one thing - I hope nobody gets offended; I don't wanna sound disgusting, and I am certainly not fan of any anthropologic theories - but you can see on that guy's face that he is limited and stupid, and his IQ is not higher than the size of the shoes he's wearing.
I was training in an old garage - just a roof. And when its snowed, it would cover the floor, so I would have to clear this first. I didn't have a punch bag. There was no place to buy it, so I managed to get a speed ball, but it didn't have the swivel mechanism, so I just nailed it to the ceiling and started kicking.