Change of Opponents? I’m Ready at BetLM

Change of Opponents? I’m Ready

It’s never easy switch­ing from one oppo­nent to another, but you work it out. I was sup­posed to be fight­ing another fighter next Sat­ur­day at UFC 130, but now I’m fight­ing Matt Hamill at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas and am ready to go to war.

Thi­ago Silva was my orig­i­nal oppo­nent, but he was later pulled from the fight and then replaced by Hamill. So, basi­cally, I went from focus­ing on an aggres­sive Muay Thai striker to a strong wrestler.

Maybe that is big dif­fer­ence in style to a lot of peo­ple, but I’ve been used to this kind of thing through­out my career and have always been able to adapt. When I fought in PRIDE tour­na­ments in Japan, you would never know which guy you’d end up fac­ing and you’d have to be pre­pared for all kind of styles. Some­times I had like a few days notice in PRIDE, and I was younger and very raw. It was a dif­fer­ent era back then.

Silva would have been a great fight for me, as he’s a guy who likes to stand and bang and doesn’t mind get­ting a lit­tle dirty in there. He prob­a­bly would have slugged it out with me up close until I caught him on the jaw and knocked him clean out. I’m sure it would have been an excit­ing fight for as long as it lasted.

Hamill can some­times stand and trade and other times likes to go to the ground and use his wrestling. He’s hurt a few guys with his hands and power, but his main thing is def­i­nitely his wrestling.

So, Hamill has stood and traded with some guys in his career, but I am sure he knows it is bad for his health if he does that next week! For real! I’ve trained for all areas — but I just want it to be excit­ing. I think he will try and take me down and I’m ready for him to avoid strik­ing with me at all costs.

I’m under no pres­sure to get a knock­out, but I always try for the knock­out. I have kept that men­tal­ity from PRIDE, where it was more impor­tant to have a great fight than win or lose. I would never crit­i­cize any fighter but at the end of the day, this is enter­tain­ment, and I want to give the fans what they pay­ing their money for. This is the career I chose — fight­ing — and so let’s fight.

I’m not the first guy from the Wolf­s­lair camp to go up against Hamill. My ‘mate’ Mike Bisp­ing faced and defeated Hamill in 2007. Those two guys put on a really excit­ing fight for three rounds, and Bisp­ing just edged it. Some peo­ple saw it as con­tro­ver­sial, but I per­son­ally thought Mike just about edged it. That was a good night for us because also on the UFC 75 show in Lon­don I beat Dan Hen­der­son to become the first ever undis­puted cham­pion of both UFC and PRIDE. If you look up in his­tory who was the first ever undis­puted cham­pion, there will be a pic­ture of me.

I’ve been lucky enough to have Mike train­ing out here with me in Cal­i­for­nia, and it’s always great to work with him again. As well as being a great fighter, Mike is also very good at break­ing down fights and giv­ing advice.

He has been in there already with Hamill, so he knows what the guy is all about. Mike also is a lit­tle crazy, there’s some­thing a lit­tle wrong with him, ’cause he likes train­ing and get­ting all sweaty. That guy loves work­ing out, I try to tell him there’s bet­ter things to do, but he don’t lis­ten. I’ve never seen any­one train as hard as Bisp­ing. He’s the oppo­site of me, he finds it easy to push him­self to train. But he’s good to have around because he is fun to be around and works hard too. Mike helped me out a lot and he’s a great teammate.

Right now I got to go back to film­ing the “In the Moment” show for Spike TV, which you all will see next week.

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• Georges St. Pierre Does It Again, Dom­i­nates Jake Shields at UFC 129
• UFC 137 Inter­view: Mitri­one Wants to Show He’s More Than a Heavy-Handed Striker

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