Edwards Readies for Sandbox Showdown with Stout at BetLM

Yves Edwards isn’t scared of Sam Stout. Actu­ally, Edwards isn’t afraid of any 155-pound fighter the UFC has on their ultra com­pet­i­tive ros­ter. He’s a sea­soned vet­eran with almost 60 pro­fes­sional MMA fights under his belt, and has stood toe-to-toe in com­bat with com­peti­tors from nearly every inch of this planet and not bat­ted an eye. Edwards isn’t fright­ened or star­tled or intim­i­dated by any light­weight oppo­nent the UFC throws into the Octa­gon with him.

Unless that oppo­nent is on fire or a zombie.

The 34 year old native of the Bahamas fully admits he is spooked by two things: fire and zom­bies. “I really believe zom­bies are a real­is­tic pos­si­bil­ity,” states Edwards, who has a sur­pris­ingly ratio­nal ori­gin story for zom­bies and an out­break of it in our life­time. “Patient zero will start out of someone’s gym. A guy has their dog in the gym, the dog gets a staph infec­tion, the dog gets bit with rabies, some type of cross breed­ing with the staph and rabies hap­pens and then the dog bites the per­son because the dog goes crazy. The per­son goes to the hos­pi­tal and this crazy strain of staph/rabies turns them into a zom­bie and it all started right there in somebody’s gym.”

This is clearly a dis­con­cert­ing the­ory for the Amer­i­can Top Team light­weight, con­sid­er­ing he is a pro­fes­sional ath­lete who trains in sev­eral fight gyms all around the nation. Edwards is cur­rently knee deep into his 14th year in MMA and has secured back-to-back wins since his return to the UFC last Sep­tem­ber. Even with all of this fight expe­ri­ence includ­ing a dis­tin­guished 40–16–1 over­all record, Edwards knows his patented brand of “thugjitsu” is no match for the walking dead.

“You can’t arm­bar a zom­bie. You try to arm­bar a zom­bie and it will bite you on the leg. You can’t do jiu-jitsu with a zom­bie. Kick­box­ing might help a bit. At the same time, I’m a ‘germa­phobe’. I’m afraid I’ll get scratched and infected. I could kick the zom­bie in the head and his head explodes and I’ll get zom­bie juice on me and I get infected because I have a scrape some­where. It’s kind of scary.”

Luck­ily for Edwards, at UFC 131 in Van­cou­ver, Canada he will not be squar­ing off against a brain hun­gry zom­bie. Instead, Edwards will face the equally men­ac­ing “Hands of Stone” Stout. With his 17–6–1 record, the kick­boxer turned MMA fighter has been a fix­ture of the UFC’s ever expand­ing light­weight divi­sion for the past five years. The most impres­sive stat of Stout’s Octa­gon career is him receiv­ing four “Fight of the Night” awards.

“That tells me he is always in it. It tells me there is never a sec­ond where he is not pre­pared to fight, not ready to fight and not try­ing to win. Look at the guys he’s fought. Spencer Fisher, Jeremy Stephens, Matt Wiman, Joe Lau­zon, Rich Clementi are all tough guys who go in there and are ready to throw down. Then you watch the fights and every minute he is in it to win it. Even the fights he is obvi­ously down on the score­cards, he’s still fight­ing his ass off come the third round. He fights the third round like he fights the first round. He’s always there, he’s always dangerous.”

Stout’s main weapon is his standup, which has been honed by famed strik­ing coach Shawn Tomp­kins. But the two attrib­utes that keep Stout alive and well in these cage wars lie else­where. “The kid has a great chin and he’s got great con­di­tion­ing,” Edwards explains, not­ing that Stout’s head and gas tank could be made of stone as well as his hands. “But with a guy like Sam Stout who can always push the pace, the most impor­tant thing to train is con­di­tion­ing. His skills are solid, his kick­box­ing is solid and I’m sure he hits hard, but he’s got a great chin, he doesn’t get dis­cour­aged and he has great conditioning.”

For the past year, Edwards has been sharp­en­ing his thugjitsu skills and work­ing on his gas tank in sunny South­ern Cal­i­for­nia. “I’ve been doing a lot of work on my con­di­tion­ing at the Body Shop in LA with Anto­nio McKee and the guys down there,” says Edwards, who jokes that some of the younger fight­ers have said they used to watch him fight when they were in high school. After all these years, Edwards believes he is still devel­op­ing as a bet­ter fighter. “There was a spot where I think my game didn’t evolve much, but in the past year or two years it has evolved again and I’m start­ing to get back to shoot­ing for the front of that curve.”

It isn’t a wholly new Edwards, just a bet­ter ver­sion of him and on that is even more con­fi­dent. Edwards made his Octa­gon return in front of a home­town crowd at UFC Fight Night 22 in Austin, Texas where he scored a solid unan­i­mous deci­sion vic­tory over John Gun­der­son. Edwards fol­lowed this up with a sec­ond round rear naked choke win against TUF alum Cody McKen­zie, which earned Edwards both a “Sub­mis­sion of the Night” and a “Fight of the Night” bonus. For the third time in less than a year, Edwards will be enter­ing the cage and this time it is against a chal­lenger who is always a poten­tial “Fight of the Night”.

“It def­i­nitely gets you more pumped. You do this because you love the com­pe­ti­tion. I love to get paid and the money is great, and the fame I could do with­out because that means noth­ing to me. But to fight a guy like that is excit­ing. It kind of makes your mouth water. I seri­ously have been watch­ing his tapes and watch­ing his fights and I start gig­gling to myself that this is going to be so much fun. I’m really excited about it. It’s going to be one of those things. I know he is going to bring all his toys to the sand­box and he’s going to be look­ing to play with them and I’m bring­ing all my toys too, so it is going to be a good time.”

On June 11th at Rogers Arena, Edwards’ thugjitsu will clash with Stout’s “Hands of Stone”. Almost a decade and a half in MMA, Edwards is more psy­ched than ever about fight­ing tooth and nail with best com­pe­ti­tion the world has to offer in arguably the tough­est divi­sion. “The way the game is right now it is freak­ing fan­tas­tic, and being a part of it is like liv­ing in a movie.”

As long as it isn’t a zom­bie movie, Edwards should be ok.

 

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