Evans: ‘We’ll see who can suffer the longest’
EMBRACING THE SUFFERING My mindset is, I’m gonna try to go where my opponent doesn’t want to go – we’ll…
EMBRACING THE SUFFERING
My mindset is, I’m gonna try to go where my opponent doesn’t want to go – we’ll see who can suffer the longest. That’s basically it, and if he can outlast me in suffering, then he wins the fight. But it’s a mindset to drive yourself to suffer. My wrestling coaches used to call it mental toughness. They would dog us out in practice and make us do things that we possibly couldn’t do, but they made us feel like we had to do it. They’d say ‘mental toughness, mental toughness’ and you learn to like the suffering – you learn to welcome that feeling when it comes. A lot of people run from it because they want to start feeling okay again, but when you embrace the suffering, you just ride it out, and pretty soon, you’ve outlasted your opponent.
ON BEING A ROLE MODEL
I’m very comfortable with the fact that I bring an African-American face to the UFC. It’s excellent if black kids, or any kids for that matter, see me and are inspired by what I do. I’m very excited to be a good representative for black people and a good role model in general. I enjoy it because I know it’s not gonna be around forever and who knows how long it can last. I know everybody doesn’t always have this chance to experience this, so I feel like I’m experiencing a once in a lifetime thing and I’m just enjoying it as long as I can.
ON GETTING THROUGH THE TOUGH FIGHTS
In my mind, I say ‘there’s no way that I’m losing this fight. No matter how bad I’m feeling, I’m just thinking the whole time that I’m in a fight and getting pushed that ‘I’m not losing, I’m not losing.’ I just say that over and over to myself. When things are getting hard or I’m fading out, I just say that and it works out.
ON THE FANS’ MISCONCEPTIONS
I think sometimes that once the fans have their mind made up about you, that’s it, and I think a lot of it comes from that Matt Hughes thing (during season two of The Ultimate Fighter), where he said I was cocky and that I like to showboat, and I think that stigma has followed me. No matter what I do, they see my personality as concrete, and there’s no changing it for a lot of people. A lot of people are very lazy with their opinions, and once their mind is made up one way, they either refuse or it’s very hard for them to go another way. But I take the good with the bad, and the good thing is this – I’ve never met a fan that didn’t like me.