“There are so many different paths I had to go through and mistakes I made along the way, and I had to make those mistakes to understand what it is. Now him and my younger brothers coming up, you still have to learn those lessons, but you can evolve faster, and you can avoid the mistakes that the people that paved that path for you made. He has the heart and mind for it, but he’s excelling so fast because he can leap those things, those little challenges and all those things that I had to go through, and what took me maybe years to learn can take him months.”
The excitement in Phillips’ voice when talking about his brothers’ development in martial arts is evident, and it’s almost as if he wants to discuss them more than his own fight against Raoni Barcelos this weekend. But that’s just what comes with the territory when this isn’t about the next fight in the Octagon, but the next fight in life. Phillips really does live and breathe this, and he always has, even during the years when everyone else his age was doing anything but living like an athlete.
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“It’s not that I never got along with kids my age, and I was never an outcast or nothing, but my friends were always people that were, even when I was in high school, 30-something years old and owning the jiu jitsu gym, owning Icon Sports Performance. And these guys I would hang around with would sponsor me for tournaments, I would get lunch with them, dinner with them, go compete every weekend and I was just hanging around those type of people who were a lot older. And I’ve had a couple friends around my age, but I was just always training throughout high school.”
