“I still think about it all the time,” Dobson said of the defeat to the Australian grappler. “A loss always hurts, but what allowed me to get through that was the fact that I was legitimately injured. I had a bucket handle meniscus tear for like four years. So, for the last three fights, I’ve had to deal with that. I think that’s why I’m a lot more cheery now because now I’m a hundred percent. I can actually run, I can do roadwork, I can wrestle, I can do all these things again, so it’s almost like I’m falling in love with MMA again, versus having to substitute certain exercises so I don’t further injure my knee. But I would love to get that one back, for sure.”
That will have to wait, and that’s where the ugly comes in, because Dobson estimated that it was a 17-hour flight to get to Abu Dhabi for his UFC 280 bout against Armen Petrosyan. But he doesn’t care. He gets to fight, he’s healthy, and he’s looking forward to returning to the win column. And that’s all good for the 30-year-old, even if it’s tough to sit back and smell the roses when you’re preparing for a fistfight.
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“It is hard to live in that moment because of training and everything like that, but this is an experience that I definitely appreciate, and something that I do every once in a while is sit back and go, ‘Wow, I’ve been training for so long and we’re finally here.’ That’s what kind of gets me through training. I haven’t taken a break too much, so it’s easy to get mentally burned out, but when I sit back and look at how long it’s taken and where I’ve been and how far I’ve come, it definitely makes the days go by a lot faster.”
Not the flights, but enough about that and let’s hear more about that knee injury.
“I tore my knee in 2016 or 2017, and I just had to suck it up,” said Dobson, who basically fought his entire pro career with one bad wheel. And when you’re surrounded by legitimate tough guys like Mark Coleman, Matt Brown and the late powerlifting legend Louie Simmons, a young fighter can almost feel sheepish to admit being less than one hundred percent.
