How Maldonado plans to fight into his 40’s
Fabio Maldonado: “I want a bloody fight. That won’t make my career shorter. I don’t get punched when I train. I’m very experienced at boxing.”
There is a style of boxing in which a fighter is willing to take a punch in order to deliver one. However, MMA with its 4 oz gloves, is another animal. Not so for Fabio Maldonado, whose style is at once exciting and frightening – he gets dragged through the garden of head trauma with something between disdain and delight, before giving back.
Maldonado is 5-4 in the UFC, and 22-7 overall in his MMA career. Plus he is 22-0 as a professional boxer, with 21 KOs. And he went 40-5 as an amateur boxer. And the light heavyweight will take a fight at heavyweight, or at a catchweight, as he is Saturday night.
If you love MMA you love to watch him fight, and you worry some that this can’t be good for his brain. However, the fighter, 35, says he plans to fight into his 40’s and that the key is not taking punishment in training.
“I want a bloody fight. That won’t make my career shorter,” said Maldonado to Lucas Rezende for BE. “I don’t get punched when I train. I’m very experienced at boxing and know I’m back with Mike Rhodes, my boxing coach since 2003. We know how to train and preserve our heads.
“I don’t get too punished while training. Sometimes people train too much and then lose their chins when sparring. I still want to be fighting when I’m 40 and with a good chin. I love to fight like this because I watched the Rocky Balboa movies when I was a kid and I wanted to be him when I was 10.”
Fabio Maldonado fights Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson Saturday night in the co-main event of UFC 186, in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.