Issue 100
April 2013
There’s been some talk that Junior Dos Santos’ corner should have pulled him out after a couple of rounds, so one-sided was the fight against Cain Velasquez at UFC 155 in December, but I don’t agree with that at all.
Benson Henderson
The current UFC lightweight champion explains why a fighters corner should never throw in the towel
As a fighter you always want to continue, you always want to go forward. You’ve got to give it your best effort. Your coaches are there to make whatever decisions they feel they have to make, but the way I see it is it might hurt your psyche as a fighter and whatnot if your coaches think you can’t do anything else and pull you. That would probably damage a few fighters’ psyches I’m sure.
It’s just so much better to leave the guy in there, even if he is taking a beating. We all get beat up, it happens. As a fighter, we know that. It’s part of the game. Just like getting knocked out in five seconds or getting caught in a freak submission; this stuff happens in mixed martial arts. It’s gonna happen, so embrace it.
It’s part of the game, it’s why we compete. Getting beat up is part of the sport. It happens to us all every once in a while, but in the long scheme of things it doesn’t matter.
But having your coaches kind of quitting on you, saying, ‘Hey, yeah, you’re really getting beat up,’ and then taking you out of the contest, that would probably do more damage to me, personally. I can’t speak for any other fighters, but for me I’d be more than a little annoyed. I’d say to John (Crouch), ‘What are you doing coach?’ I might be getting beat up, but I’ll keep plugging away! Never pull me out of there, I won’t surrender.
Naturally, I was also intrigued by the lightweight fight on the UFC 155 card too. Jim Miller and Joe Lauzon put on a great fight. Miller came out like a freakin’ bat outta hell. He was intense that first round. But he kind of paid the price for it. He got tired and slowed down quite a bit in the second round even.
And that’s when Lauzon came back strong. Everyone should know – and if you don’t know you know now – that with Lauzon there’s just no quit in him. He’ll always fight back and fight hard. There’s a guy who would never allow you to pull him out.
As regards to my own ambitions for 2013, I hope to fight a couple of times for sure. I guess it depends on how you feel mentally afterwards. It all hangs on the whole injury thing, and how your body heals up. Not so much an injury that stops you from training, but how beat up you are after a fight.
If you’re pretty beat up after a fight, and you need to take a month or two off to heal up – little bruises, even. It sucks. So it depends on how I have to heal up.
Fighting’s a hard sport. It’s tough. So all of those aspects will add up to how many times a year you can compete. For me, I like to stay active. I like to stay busy. But, at the same time, if I have enough time between my actual training camps, I also like to do regular training simply to make sure I get better. I am still pretty young in this sport, whereas a lot of these guys have been fighting for a long time.
Nate Diaz, for example, has had 15 fights in the UFC. He’s even had more bonuses (10) than I’ve had fights in the UFC. I’ve got a lot of work to do, training wise. I’ve got a lot of hours to make up. They have more hours practicing their boxing, for example, than I do. I like to have time in between my fights to train and really get better.
My ambition is to be the greatest mixed martial artist in the history of the sport, that’s what I am working towards.
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