“I think fighters are a little more inclined to what you’re saying because I couldn’t see the Lakers going to go play in a schoolyard court in some other foreign country just to play basketball, or racetrack drivers being like, ‘Racers gotta race,’ and making a homemade track on an island. But for fighters, what you go through every day – life is a fight. Facing an obstacle and being able to overcome it. That happens in life, in jobs, in sports, and in its most purest form in a real fight. I think we’re used to those unique situations. To answer the question, I guess I did fight in a weird bar setting on the floor that was just a mat on the floor. They put some makeshift ropes around it like when Jean-Claude (Van Damme) fought Tong Po in Kickboxer style. It was just kind of like a rope. We were warming up in an open section of the bar, so it was just blocked off for us to warm up in before we walked out. People could watch us warm up and drink right by us, talk to us, whatever. So, it was a blocked off area of the bar where we’d go fight at, and I fought there. That was really weird. Just warming up in the bar, you walk through the crowd, you fight on the floor. One of the funny things about that one is I was wearing underwear from Target to fight in, and I went out, and I fought the guy. It was normal for me. I elbowed him to finish the fight, and I was the first fight. After that – this is how makeshift it was – a security guard was there, and a cop, and their rule was, ‘Hey, that didn’t look safe. The rest of the guys have to wear headgear or they can’t fight.’ And they’re like, ‘What do you mean? It’s MMA. They’re grappling. They can’t just do that.’ And then they’re like, ‘Well you can’t do those elbows.’ They couldn’t comprehend that we were just elbowing each other, and then, they were just like, ‘The headgear is going to definitely work.’ After that, my teammates were mad at me because they’re like, ‘What the heck? We have to wear headgear just because of this?’ And it was a security guard and a police officer making their own rules, like, ‘I’m going to shut it down if they don’t wear protective gear.’ That happened for the rest of the card. It was in a tiny, tiny city in New Mexico that even living in New Mexico, I’d never really imagined was there, at some weird bar.”
