Add in the fact that his wife and two of their three kids will be in attendance at the O2 Arena, his boys seeing him fight live for the first time, and the opponent really doesn’t matter for the 37-year-old, who gets to have a full circle moment and enjoy it even before the Octagon door shuts, because unlike some of his younger peers, Grant was doing this before it was cool in his home country.
“We were the generation that started to get to the higher sort of promotions and, God, the training back then,” he laughs. “I remember sometimes we used to have to sweep ice off the mats just to train. My gym itself, it’s got air conditioning, it’s got heating and it’s lovely and clean to walk in. But I’ve been in some terrible gyms and I’ve definitely paid my dues over the years. I’ve been to some gyms that didn’t have a toilet and we had to sweep rat s**t off the mat. (Laughs) It was f**king brutal when you think about it. But yeah, sometimes I don’t think these guys nowadays know that they’ve got some fantastic MMA gyms, some fantastic coaches all under one roof, ten minutes from the house, most of them.”
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Yes, it’s nice to be in a clean gym with a toilet and no need to sweep up rat droppings before practice, but maybe, just maybe, in the third round of a tough fight, guys like Grant have an extra reserve to dig into to make that final push and win, all owed to those days when it was brutally hot in the summer and worse in the winter. It’s in those situations where fighters are made, and DaveyGrant is most certainly a fighter.
“I know everyone knows what the fight game’s like and we’re all pushing ourselves to the limit,” he said. “And you do need to be able to go that extra mile if you want to go fighting, and especially get to the UFC. But I’m very old school and the way that everyone trains now has changed a lot. I’ve put myself through the depths of Hell in training camps and back again, and the same in fights, and I feel like I’m prepared to go places that other people aren’t. So I’m just going to take him into deep water and then take away his life jacket, to be honest.”
