The UFC’s unlikeliest bromance continues, with Liverpudlian middleweight Darren Till leaping to Khamzat Chimaev’s defense in an ESPN interview. Till revealed that he encouraged Khamzat to “embrace being the bad guy” following his massive weight miss ahead of UFC 279. Khamzat was widely touted as the UFC’s next big thing heading into UFC 279, with a title shot all but guaranteed, but missing the welterweight limit by eight pounds could well change things.
“It’s time to embrace being the bad guy now. Embrace it. I feel like since my career started… I felt like a bad guy a lot of the time. But I just said to him after the press conference, the weight cut, ‘What are you going to do mate? Just embrace it. You’re the villain, now.
Till: Chimaev Needs to “embrace being the bad guy”
You’re the bad guy, you’re the Joker. You’re the evil guy. So just embrace it. And he did. [Laughs]. So good. So good.”
He pointed out that Chimaev tried to cut the weight, but wasn’t able to. Till referenced his own fall from grace, a fateful knockout loss to Jorge Masvidal when he, too, was an exciting young prospect. A bad weight cut led to that knockout, which has somewhat derailed Till’s rise to the top. “I see what Khamzat did to make the weight. He tried his utmost.
I don’t want to go into detail about it, but I know what he did, and the right decision was to stop cutting. Every fighter will know this… His body just shut down. His body stopped responding at a certain point. Now okay, it was at a bad point where he was like seven, eight pounds over. But what can you do? Do you want to do it like me, where I completely went blind for the [Jorge] Masvidal weight cut and then look what happens?
I’m not saying Masvidal didn’t beat me fair and square, I’m just saying that if I’d been at a healthy weight — like middleweight when Kelvin Gastelum was throwing shots at my chin I was eating them, because I’m healthy. So it was the right move for Khamzat to stop cutting, because things would have gotten considerably worse.”
Till continued, advising Khamzat to consider a move up to middleweight, even if the Chechen star can “comfortably” still make welterweight.
“I wouldn’t [advise him to go back to welterweight], but the only thing I know with Khamzat is he can make welterweight comfortably, because his body carries so much muscle and muscle carries the most water.
When you are doing a weight cut, the more muscle you have the easier it is to lose, to drop the weight because your muscle carries a lot of water. You can’t trim fat in one night.”
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