“I really do believe in getting one percent better every day,” offered Blaydes, who won a Junior College National Championship as a redshirt sophomore at Harper College. “Every day doesn’t have to be hard; there are days and weeks where we just drill.
“I didn’t really spar a whole lot from August to maybe mid-December — there was no need for me to be sparring, taking damage. I was doing tech sparring, and I think that is where you grow the most is doing tech rounds.
“I enjoy the process of getting better,” he added. “I like hitting pads. I like challenging my hand speed, challenging my memory, my footwork, seeing how complicated we can make it look because I know it’s not going to be that complicated in the cage.”
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While he prides himself on having honed his skills and bringing a full arsenal of weapons into the Octagon each time out, Blaydes is quick to acknowledge that life in the heavyweight ranks doesn’t always come down to who is more skillful.
More often than naught, fights come down to a race to see who can land a momentum-shifting blow first, as has been the case in each of Pavlovich’s last five trips into the Octagon. In his two most recent appearances, the surging Russian has needed less than a minute to dispatch Derrick Lewis and Tai Tuivasa, two men that Blaydes sees as stylistic contemporaries of the man he faces this weekend.
“I view him as a Derrick Lewis, a Tuivasa — he’s a brawler,” he said. “He thrives in chaos and seeks chaos, and those guys that seek chaos do so because when it relies on skill and precision, they don’t believe in their skill. They believe, ‘I have to make this ugly in order for me to land.’
“I haven’t seen that he knows how to enter,” continued Blaydes, offering a glimpse into how he may approach Saturday’s main event. “He doesn’t enter with a setup, footwork, a jab — he just enters, and it works for him, but it’s not the hardest thing in the world to read.”
Some may take umbrage with Blaydes’ thoughts on the dearth of skill displayed at heavyweight, or cite his own loss to Lewis as an obvious counter to his position, but the thoughtful big man is quick to acknowledge that Lewis got the better of him, while adding a little reminder about how things were going before he made a costly mistake.
“I know I lost that one, and everyone watches the end of it, but I don’t think people remember the first round,” he said of the bout with Lewis. “Technically, I was destroying Derrick Lewis, and I’m very proud of that.
“I’m able to see the silver lining like, ‘Yeah I lost, I got knocked out, but I grew in confidence in my striking.’ I believe in my range now. I believe I can pick and pull because I never really had to do it, and that was a focus of mine in that fight and I was able to do it. It was when I switched the game plan to force the wrestling when I screwed up.”
