If you didn’t know it before, it’s now crystal clear that the 26-year-old bantamweight is a unicorn in the fight game. And yeah, he loves the fight itself as much as the days before it.
“A lot of people are like, ‘Don’t you get scared to fight?’ And yeah, I get f**king scared, but I love it so much. I love a challenge. I love experiencing emotions and all that, so now you don’t really get scared as much anymore. But I don’t know, I feel like, for me, it’s just the reward. It’s so worth all the risk and all of the fear that you may or may not have going into the fight; just the reward of getting your hand raised, not even talking about the opportunity to win a bonus or the opportunity to get two paychecks. Just the reward that you get for grinding through something for months on end and sacrificing food and sacrificing water, and it really makes you appreciate little things. And to be honest, for us, fighting’s our entire world, right? Somebody just kind of looks at it as like a fight, so that’s probably why they’re like, ‘Oh, you’re probably nervous, you’re scared.’ But in reality, you’re proud of yourself. You’re here.”
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Armfield should be proud. He paid his dues, weathered the storms that come along with fighting on the regional MMA circuit, and in July of last year, he got the call from the UFC to face David Onama, who had already decisioned Armfield when both were amateurs. Onama repeated his victory, this time via submission in the second round of a competitive scrap, but even a loss couldn’t take away the moment from Armfield.
