It’s a rare MMA fan who doesn’t find UFC lightweight Tony Ferguson’s rapid decline upsetting. Ferguson rode a 12-fight winning streak into a title eliminator against Justin Gaethje. Gaethje snapped the streak, and Ferguson is now staring down the barrel of a six-fight skid.
Josh Thomson knows the feeling: his own winning streak was snapped by a surging Ferguson, and Thomson never recovered his momentum.
Josh Thomson Begs UFC Fan Favorite Tony Ferguson To Retire
Now, Thomson is joining the chorus of those who want to see “El Cucuy” retire, making his case on a recent episode of his Weighing In podcast.
“You have to take a good, hard look at yourself in the mirror and go, ‘This is coming to an end real quick.’ It’s going to come sooner than you think.
And if not, if it doesn’t come to an end real quick, there’s a whole — and you’ll notice it within a couple years of you being retired. And I’m saying this directly to Tony, is that you’re going to notice things in your brain.
You’re going to notice things in the way you talk to people. You’re going to notice things in the way you talk to your wife, the way you talk to your kids, the way you handle yourself. You need to have a reality check.
I can’t even explain it. You have to understand how to reel it in, because you’re the only one in charge of your mentality and your body language, and the words that come out of your mouth that can affect your relationships with everyone.
And I’ve had these conversations with myself a lot, because there’s times when words come out of your mouth and you don’t realize it. And so I get nervous for him, watching him take these Ls. I become a little emotional, it’s a little f***ed up, but I care for the guy. I care for all these fighters.”
Tony Ferguson is refusing to retire, but Thomson wants his old opponent to look at things rationally, and learn from his experience.
“It’s 10 years off his life. Here’s the thing though, the Justin Gaethje fight and the Charles Oliveira fight, those two fights alone — and I speak from experience because it happened to me with [Ferguson] — at that age, the damage he took in that Gaethje fight, it changes you.
It changes your body. It changes the way you think. It’s not even so much [doing it] a couple times, it’s sometimes just one time. And at the age that he was at, I believe he was 36 or 37 at the time of the Gaethje fight, you’re not the same.
And after the Tony fight, I was never the same. I never fought the same after that. I fought more conservative, I was always a step behind.”
