“I don’t worry about it,” he admits. “The biggest thing I think that I’ve come to realize is it’s going to be different every time, and I have no control over what I’m going to be feeling that day. All I can control is my actions. You can’t really control feelings. You can only control actions. I’ve had fights where I’m like, ‘This is my day. I’m not losing tonight.’ And I’ve had fights where I truly believed that I was going to lose while I walked to the cage. And I’ve won both. So I know I can perform whether I’m feeling good or bad. It’s just about doing everything that I can in camp to make sure I’m feeling the best that I possibly can that day.”
FREE FIGHTS: Grant Dawson vs Mark O. Madsen | Bobby Green vs Tony Ferguson
And this isn’t baseball, where a bad pitcher gets to redeem himself four days later, or football, when a quarterback gets his shot to rebound from a bad game in seven days. If Dawson is not on top of his game on Saturday, he likely will have to sit on that performance until early next year. That’s a tough reality to deal with. Not for Dawson.
“A pitcher can say, ‘I played a perfect game, and my team just didn’t pick up the slack or didn’t pull their weight; that’s why I lost.’ For me, it’s me. If I win, I get all the credit, but if I lose, every bit of that is on me. And I like that. I like that pressure. I like putting that weight on my shoulders. Men back in the day used to kill wild animals to feed their families, and if they didn’t kill those animals, their families went hungry. What we’re feeling now is just a mild comparison of that. I can handle all of it. Put the weight on me, I can carry the boats.”
