I'm not knocking the other sports; I love other sports. There's a competitive and a technical level of them that I won't understand, probably, to a certain extent, but I've done a lot of other sports competing on college teams, and there's just nothing like fighting.

Every single woman that fights MMA has done just as much work as Ronda has; we just haven't gotten as much turnaround. Those women who came before her haven't been on magazine covers. They weren't plastered everywhere by the UFC. They didn't get the same reward back.

A lot of top fighters, what do they do after they retire from fighting? They're real popular. Like Tito Ortiz. They've got so much momentum, they're so popular and then they fall off the face of the Earth. They should take acting lessons. They should keep their fans.

I've never found that getting physical is ever the best response in a bar. You just have to make sure you keep your distance, and if it gets to a point where it gets aggressive then the best thing to do is go get a bouncer and get the situation resolved intelligently.

I wish everyone well, but you need to focus on yourself. You need to stop putting your hand out. Everyone wants hand outs. Everyone wants things for free. You've got to put in the work. You've got to grind. You've got go through the struggle, and you've got to get it.

Once I dedicated my time to mixed martial arts, I became careful about what I let into my mind. I made a goal of being the best on Earth in mixed martial arts and fighting. I wanted to build my mind into something good, not just of the world. I wanted to be different.

There is a difference between a fighter and a martial artist. A fighter is training for a purpose: He has a fight. I’m a martial artist. I don’t train for a fight. I train for myself. I’m training all the time. My goal is perfection. But I will never reach perfection.

There is a difference between a fighter and a martial artist. A fighter is training for a purpose: He has a fight. I'm a martial artist. I don't train for a fight. I train for myself. I'm training all the time. My goal is perfection. But I will never reach perfection.

One of the reasons I got into fighting was because I'd never really been in a fight. It's like in Fight Club, the famous line, 'How much can you really know about yourself if you've never been in a fight?'... It's the the clearest mirror you'll ever stand in front of.

I think part of what people are responding to with Lambeau Field is that it's a solid culture. There's so much committed to what hockey means and that's how we feel about football. It's just a great connection between the culture of football and the culture of hockey.

It was really tough being in jail. It doesn't get much lower. You're in a filthy room. The food is terrible, and you're surrounded by people who have done all types of crazy crimes. You have nothing that belongs to you, not even your own underwear. It's just terrible.

After several different marriages and failures, my mom started turning to the Lord. So she brought us to church. We got involved with the youth programs, and I got on fire a couple months in, like, 'Wow, this feels good.' At 10 years old, you don't know. It felt good.

I always knew what I could do in there and believed that I would win the world title. But when it actually happens, when your dreams all come true, it is the culmination of a life's work. The feeling you get, I don't have words for it. I don't know how to describe it.

Let's be honest: I don't want to walk out to boos. I always want to be cheered, like anyone, and I've been very lucky over the years to have a lot of support. Coming to America, I'm always the away guy, and so people thought their guy had to take me out, and they boo.

I've been blessed; I've been getting so many amazing opportunities because of the UFC. I know there are going to be haters no matter how successful I am, and I just have to be thankful for all the blessings that I have because all of it can be over before you know it.

Even though we don't speak the same language, we're friends. I still make him laugh. You know it's hard to make Fedor laugh, he don't change his facial expressions at all. I don't even know if he understands what I be saying, but when he gets around me, he be smiling.

Scott Coker, I've known him such a long time, he's always been a straight shooter. He's always been very, very respectful towards me. He understands the business. He understands marketing and how to push the fighters to make them superstars in a household environment.

I think a kid from the inner city, if I had to recruit, is the ideal person for MMA. They'd be less likely to be affected by hard work. They'd be less likely to not appreciate something when someone is helping them out, because they probably don't have a ton of stuff.

The key thing is confidence, and you get that from the actions that you take. It can be anything from getting chicks, being in a fight, having success at work, having a good family. A lot of that stuff comes from having confidence, so that's one of the biggest things.

I've never found that getting physical is ever the best response in a bar. You just have to make sure you keep your distance, and if it gets to a point where it gets aggressive, then the best thing to do is go get a bouncer and get the situation resolved intelligently.

I used to imagine it. I used to pretend that my Peugeot driving to the gym in the rain in Dublin was a Ferrari on the Vegas strip. And now that I have that? I can't even describe that feeling. That's why I like the best - the best cars, the best food, the best watches.

The key to effective visualization is to create the most detailed, clear and vivid a picture to focus on as possible. The more vivid the visualization, the more likely, and quickly, you are to begin attracting the things that help you achieve what you want to get done.

The heavyweight division is always very intriguing. These are the heavy hitters, you know? Every time when you do a mistake, it's the end of the fight. So you have to be careful all the time, and this is what makes this division so intriguing, so exciting for the fans.

Coming from a standing background in striking, I couldn't catch up to the guys with 20-plus years of training on the ground. I had to learn submissions. I found out it wasn't an easy road. I had six losses in a row, but I still felt I was the best fighter in the world.

My opponent is my teacher and I am his teacher. I have to show him what he's doing wrong and I have to learn from what he's teaching me. You can't think of him as an enemy, it's the wrong mindset, you don't fight with anger or hate, you're always going to lose that way.

All I do is fight, consistently, the best guys in the world, and sure, I've lost a couple here and there, but I've certainly won the majority of my fights. There are those who pick and choose opponents and try to pad their record along the way, but I've never done that.

I'm just going to be myself; there's no reason for me to try and go out there and put a certain facade on or emphasize, 'Hey, I'm this. You need to believe it.' I just want to be the best that I can be, and if people like me, that's great, and if they don't, they don't.

I've kind of lived the same lifestyle I've had since I was a little kid. Basically, working out and hanging out with my friends and competing. I feel like a really lucky guy. I haven't had to do anything I don't want to do in life, and that's not the case with everyone.

They had to re-shape the head of my femur back round. They had to trim my hip socket up a little bit. I had a lot of extra bone growth just from years of stressing it out. Because of that bone growth, it caused an impingement in my hip, which tore my labrum off the bone.

There are two things I want to be able to know when I walk into a fight, or with anything in life. And I'm not Superman, I'm not even that great at fighting. Those two things are: I have done everything in my power to prepare for this and I will not quit, no matter what.

I was really close to my father since I was young. He always told me that I had to work in order to become a man, so I had to stay with him when my mother left. He always took me to work to help him as a bricklayer. I was just a kid, so I did what I could do to help him.

WWE is something I'm looking at. Definitely have been throwing little feelers out there to get an opportunity. Because I have achieved everything that I have set out to do in every organization except the WWE. I didn't get the world title. I got everything else but that.

For me, MMA is like speed chess. It's like I'm herding a person into a certain position. Say my endgame is an arm bar. I'm not gonna actually take you and put you there. What I'm going to do is convince you that it's a good idea to move in the direction I want you to go.

People say this all the time and everyone, like, nods their head and is like, 'Oh yeah, totally,' but no one ever does it, including myself. I can do better at it, is just drinking a lot of water, like a gallon and a half, two gallons a day, like, straight water all day.

I want everyone to know I'm coming out of retirement because it's time to free the MMA world of the virus that's known as Tito Ortiz. We've been suffering through his boring fights for too many years, and it's about time that someone beats it out of him once and for all.

Unfortunately, the reporters ask the same questions over and over again. When reporters keep asking the same questions, they've got to recognize I may hear these questions 20 to 30 times in a matter of days. It gets to the point where I think, 'Read the other interviews!'

Don't get me wrong - I love going to academy every day and training as hard as I can; I love to learn. But I have other plans. When you are in the UFC, you gotta save 80 percent of your time for that. I want to do other nice stuff, other things that give me pleasure also.

I'm definitely very excited to see Cormier fight Brock Lesnar. I think Daniel Cormier wins the fight. He's just too fast. I feel like, when I fought him, he was quicker than me with certain combinations. I can only imagine he's going to be a lot quicker than Brock Lesnar.

My number one recommendations for part time grapplers is: no alcohol - no smoking - Follow the Gracie diet. The reason I say that is because smoking and alcohol put a lot of effort on your body. Your lungs. Your liver. Your stomach. These things will make you suffer, man.

I knew I was a world champion and a top contender at the highest level for over a decade, but I think I'll be remembered as somebody that was an ambassador for the sport, someone who helped build something bigger than myself, and also for the team I've been able to build.

While wrestling in college as a junior, it came to a point where wrestling just wasn't enough for me anymore. I love wrestling, but I felt like I was missing something, and so the striking part about MMA, the boxing and kickboxing, was what got me really interested in MMA.

Somebody with a huge brand like Bellator under an even huger brand like Viacom, to have them put their faith in me, to put me in so many things, to put me in commercials, send me to all these events, and just to continue to put me in the cage with great talent, it's great.

When push comes to shove, I'm a fighter, and I'm going to force someone to fight. It takes a lot of technique, it takes a lot of skill, but to take that, and make something of it, it's a lot of heart and a lot of determination, and that's something I have. That's who I am.

I hate seeing it; I hate watching it. More importantly, I hate people that don't understand the environment - how small Ferguson is, how it's really a sense of community, and, you know, it's a good place. We shouldn't have been looting and rioting, tearing up our own city.

I go to a wrestling match, and I love it. But at a wrestling match, on every level - that includes Division I - you go into an empty and cold gym, you roll out a mat, and you set 10 chairs up on each side. That's a dual meet, and it's very hard to act like it's a big event.

People got to understand, the fighters at the top are the fighters that are supposed to get paid because they're the guys that are bringing people in, bringing eyes to the TV, getting pay-per-views buys, and putting people in the seats. I mean, that's what it comes down to.

If I have a chance to make a larger amount of money in a legacy fight against the No. 1 welterweight in history, it makes sense for me to want that fight. You have a lot of pay-per-view money coming to this company. Why shouldn't the champion partake in a piece of that pie?

You look at teams in college, the MMA world, and beyond that allow bullying, where guys get jealous during training and stuff like that. You need to have a space where everyone feels like they have an equal opportunity - like they have support, people watching out for them.

I did takwondo from the time I was pretty young and also played I did taekwondo for martial arts and then also played football, baseball, and basketball against older kids because of my brother being older. I learned pretty quickly to not be intimidated and to not back down.

I felt like I could be a good example that you don't have to have all the right things in life, all the doors already open for you, in order to do great things. In fact, I truly believe that a lot of people who do great things, many of them have come from harder backgrounds.

Share This Page