Enter “The Hangman.”
“No one had actually come and asked me,” Hooker said, explaining how he went from waiving his voucher to get back into New Zealand after UFC 266 to posting up a temporary residency in Las Vegas. “I’d heard about it after the fight. In my head, I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m going home.’ But then, the opportunity was presented.”
It was an opportunity he couldn’t turn down, and the 31-year-old was back in the gym days after celebrating his own win alongside his teammate Alexander Volkanovski’s title defense victory against Brian Ortega. But this time, he stayed put in the Pacific time zone.
“I’m with Frank Hickman while he’s out here (at Syndicate MMA), and my coach Eugene Bareman is just doing everything through Frank,” Hooker explained. “Eug and Frank are programming all of my training, so I’ve got a lot of people saying, ‘Oh, come here. Come here. Do this. Do that.’ It’s not on me. It’s not something as a fighter you should be concerned about. I should just be concerned with showing up and doing the work.”
The bulk of the work that is cut out for the Kiwi resides on the ground, as executing a gameplan on the mat against a dynamic grappler like Makhachev is certainly something that can’t be overlooked.
