“Honestly, when that fight got canceled, I was pretty pissed off,” said Brundage. “Not anything that the guy can control. And I reached out to him afterwards, but it is a bummer. You put in a lot of time and effort and sacrifice and then the rug kind of gets pulled out from underneath you. But yeah, I know who he is and I’ve watched film. I’ve watched a lot less film this time around because I feel like I already know who he is. And it’s a lot less built up in my head than it was the first time. I don’t know if that’s a good thing or a bad thing; I can’t really tell you that,, but I can tell you that that’s just how it is. It’s not as built up in my head, and I tend to think that’s a good thing. But like I said, I don’t know, maybe it’s not.”
Preview Saturday’s Entire Fight Card
Brundage laughs, and as one of the most honest competitors in the game, he refuses to build up anything beyond what happens on fight night, and when he does fall short of getting his hand raised, it’s not attached to excuses or even the old standby of “just not my night.”
“I never give myself that out of, ‘Oh, you just got caught,’” said Brundage. “I feel like sometimes that’s nice to say that because it’s like, ‘Okay, well this is all that happened.’ But then I feel like it’s hard to get better and learn when you take that mentality. I’ve been really good my whole career at taking losses and dealing with losses. And I don’t know if that’s coming from a wrestling background, where you wrestle 40 times in a year and you might lose six or seven matches and you continue to wrestle that day. Most of the time in a tournament or two, you’ve got to wrestle two days later. There’s not these huge layoffs in between. And the only way I’ve ever found to get over a loss or deal with a loss correctly, it’s to just outwork it.”
