Issue 195

June 2022

Cub Swanson has been in more than his fair share of crowd-pleasing bouts, but his 2016 Fighters Only Fight of the Year with Doo Ho Choi stands above the rest, and ranks up there with the very best bouts ever seen inside the UFC’s Octagon. “Killer Cub” relives his experience of that epic clash at UFC 206…

My fight against Doo Ho Choi took place December of 2016. I was starting to build some momentum back. I was trying to make my way back towards title contention and they gave me the offer to fight Choi. Right away, I watched some tape and I'm like, ‘Man, this guy's got a laser right hand.’ He'd been knocking everyone out. There was a lot of hype on them. So the fight was intriguing.

Fight night? It was pretty wild. It’s the biggest crowd I fought in front of – just under 20,000 people. When I'm backstage, it was echoing and you could hear the crowd was roaring. I loved it! 

I remember just getting in the zone, getting fired up. I knew I was the underdog, which I felt a little disrespected by. I knew that he was a great opponent and dangerous one, but I just felt like I had the tools, and I felt like he wasn't ready for me. 

But always, in the back of your mind, you're like, ‘He better not land one of those shots. You can get knocked out.’ My mind was telling me, ‘Don't let any of that weakness seep in. Stay strong. You know what to do. Handle business.’

Right away we had a game plan of let's break him down. He's knocked everyone out in the first round. So, let's slow him down. Let's get him tired, and then we'll see what happens. 

He stands extremely wide, so I started right off the bat trying to hit a low kick. I wanted to hurt his ankle, make him keep his stance a little bit more narrow and try to weaken his base so it his strikes wouldn't be as hard. The problem I ran into is he was able to touch me right away and I wasn't able to move as easily as I thought I could. By the minute-and-a-half, two-minute mark, I had to go to our Plan B, which was getting in his face.

I started hearing the crowd chanting ‘Doo Ho Choi!’ and I was a little bit shocked by that, because I’m usually a fan favorite. I took that as an opportunity to change their minds. 

Whenever Greg Jackson was cornered me I used to love that, because the kind of fighter I am and the coach he is, we really meshed. He would always ask me a riddle, and I have to think. That’s a great technique, because that usually calms me down, brings me back to reality. Then he gives me simple instructions, and then I go back out. I realized, and my corner realized, that he really didn’t do well with pressure. We wanted to push him back to see how he dealt with it. And I just noticed that he could not handle it. And so I just swarmed him the entire time, and any time that I felt any distance it made me nervous and I wanted to smother more.

He did catch me with a straight right. It rocked me for a second, my back hit the fence. And I was fine, but I stayed there covering up for a while, because I knew that if I opened up to counter-punch him, I was gonna get put down. And then finally he got too close and I was able to clinch him and then get a quick takedown.

When you’re in fights like that, the best thing you can do is just stay focused and just keep chipping away. When I was hitting him with these big shots, I was turning my whole body trying to finish him. I knew that I had the gas tank and I just was trying to push, push, push, trying to finish him because I just felt like he was so close to being finished. He just was so tough.

I definitely thought that was my round, so if I’m going to be fair, I would have said one to one. I was prepared to take the third round, as well. I was ready to get to work.

Round 3 was crazy, because we wanted to get right back at it. When you have a fight like that you don’t realize how exhausted you are by the third round. You don’t think three rounds is that hard, but when you push a pace like that, there's no way to train like that. That's what made it a special fight. And with the crowd being so loud, I can barely hear my corner. The arena was deafening.

Those last 30 seconds, I was giving it everything I had. Cartwheel kick to spinning elbow to punches. I think most people thought that they had stopped it and I won the fight, but didn’t realize that the bell had rung. It was so loud.

At the very end of the fight I just remember realizing at that moment that this is one of those fights that you’re gonna remember forever. Doo Ho Choi, we never really spoke, because he doesn’t speak English, but you just kind of get a weird connection with people like that. I respect him as a warrior and as a person, for life. You gave it everything you have. That was a life-changing moment. It was an amazing experience. I’m going to remember that forever.

Cub Swanson was talking to UFC Connected, which is available to stream on UFC Fight Pass.