UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya’s great coach Eugene Bareman appeared recently on the great Submission Radio, and discussed the title challenge vs. light heavyweight champion Jan Blachowicz in the main event of UFC 259 on Saturday.
This is Israel’s hardest fight by quite a bit, said Bareman. This is a jump up from any of his previous challengers. And for all intents and purposes within our camp, we are building ourselves as the underdogs. And we’re doing that based on we’re giving away this size and weight advantage that we sometimes have in our favor. Now, we’re gonna give it away. … What we’re about to attempt here is, people don’t understand, a very, very difficult endeavor and a very risky one, and one that makes for all us coaches and Israel, it makes the hairs on the back of our necks stand up. Because this is a true, true challenge. And it’s a scary one, and it’s one that gets you up early in the morning and wanting to attack it. And we’ve had a great camp because it’s just a highly motivating fight. And it’s a highly motivating fight cause it’s such a dangerous fight.
The second thing that makes him very dangerous is his confidence. And his confidence doesn’t get talked about a lot because it’s not the braggadocious type of confidence that is a little bit more in line with Israel’s type of confidence. It’s just a quiet unassuming confidence that I believe Jan has in his ability, and I believe Jan is extremely confident that Israel is not gonna have the tools to beat him.
A lot of people, they understand that they have to be confident in a fight and they try to exude that, but they try too hard. Their confidence, to be honest, with a lot of fighters, it’s not really there. They’re just hoping that confidence, through acting confident, they’re hoping that this confident will just arise out of nowhere. They don’t truly have it. But that’s not the case with Jan. I feel that he is genuinely, supremely confident that he can win this fight. And that to me, that’s like a very dangerous opponent. That’s an opponent that’s got nothing to lose. That’s an opponent that’s going to be willing to come in there and take risks that the other previous opponents haven’t been willing to do. So, two things. His physical advantages. And then this quiet unassuming confidence that he kind of walks around with. I think those are the two dangerous things that kind of underline this fight.
We’ve invested a lot of time and a lot money and a lot of research into the breathing side of things and how different methods of breathing effect the central nervous system. Like, the game for us now is… look, we believe we opened up a little gap when we first came into the UFC. We believe that we had some advantages over teams and other coaches and other athletes. But nowadays, within a short period of time, we believe that gap is closing. And it’s up to us to keep that gap wide. And what we do is, we spend a lot of our time researching other methods that can help us keep that gap from shrinking and keeping it wide. And this, to be honest, is one of them. And we do believe that it will give us a really distinct advantage, especially in terms of recovery in between rounds. And it’s just another vehicle that we’re using to try and keep up one step ahead of everybody else. So, we will see if it becomes effective, but we honestly put a lot of stock in it. And first of all, there’s a lot of science there to back up what we believe will be a distinct advantage. So yeah, we’re looking forward to being able to use some of those breathing techniques to give us an advantage in this fight.
So does the win put Adesanya in GOAT contention?
It gets Israel closer to that goal of being the best, the best to ever do it. Not the greatest to ever do it, the best to ever do it. You’ve got to make a distinction, said the coach. The greatest of all time is a phrase that’s coined by Muhammad Ali, right? Everybody knows that and he’s the greatest of all time. He’s the greatest of all time for two reasons. Because of what he was able to do, become the three-time heavyweight world champion and have the great battles with George Foreman, Joe Frazier, you know, Ron Lyle, you name it. Because of those magnificent battles and using strategy and skill.
But also, the reason he has that title is because the other half of that title is about how you get that title by using your platform to make the world a better place. So, when you get that title, the greatest of all time, it’s not just about fighting. Half of it is about fighting. And half of it is what you do for the world. What are your humanitarian efforts to make the world a better place? How do you use that platform from being – cause you’ve reached the absolute heights of fighting and you’ve got this platform. Well, how do you use that platform to make the world a better place? That’s what the GOAT title encompasses.
You’ve got all these people, and it’s become a fashionable thing to throw this title around, but these young guys, they don’t know the meaning of it, they don’t understand the meaning of it. You cannot be the greatest of all time unless you serve both those purposes. And obviously these young guys have this all confused, they don’t actually know what it means. Maybe they’ll listen to me and they’ll understand it. Israel might want to be the greatest of all time, and he does a lot of humanitarian work, a lot of charity work and stuff, and he does use his platform. But to get that title, he doesn’t do enough. Not in my opinion. Neither do most of the people that try to give themselves that title. So, he can be the best to ever do it, he cannot be the greatest to ever do it unless he picks up the other side of what I just talked about. Yeah, that’s a distinction that doesn’t get talked about much, but that is the true distinction of those two titles, to be honest.
He can be the best of all time, for sure. If he wants to be the greatest of all time, then he needs to start to… he already uses his platform for a lot of good, but he probably needs to do it more if he wants that particular title. But yeah, he can definitely be the best of all time. Just like a lot of these fighters can. But a lot of these fighters that self-proclaim themselves as the greatest of all time, they’re doing that because they don’t understand what that title means.
