Former UFC middleweight champion Luke Rockhold has a warning for the new generation of fighters. The lead-up to Rockhold’s final fight at UFC 278 was marked by several appearances in which he slammed the UFC’s business practises. In his latest appearance on The MMA Hour, he continued the trend by warning young fighters to avoid “managers that work for the f****** UFC”.
“Get a manager that’s not connected to the game, that’s not part of the f****** system. There’s a f****** few managers that work for the UFC. We all know who you are. You’re f****** the sport up. And the kids that follow them, you’re all f****** it up.
Rockhold Cautions Young Fighters Not To Sign With “managers that work for the f****** UFC”
How the f*** are they going to work for you when it comes down to it? When you’ve got that title money, when you get the [leverage] right, when you f****** play hardball?
Because hardball is what gets you f****** paid and gets you f****** relevance in life. And when you have managers that work for the f****** UFC, they ain’t going to stand up for you when you f****** want that worth.
When you want that f****** paycheck, when it really comes down to it and you don’t want just your win and your show [purse] — get your f****** worth. Don’t f****** play the system because it’s easy, don’t sign that last fight contract because it’s easy.
Hold out to the f****** end and put your f****** balls on the line.” As for holding out to the end, Rockhold believes he did just that with his UFC swan song, a brutal, bloody affair that saw him take Paulo Costa to the buzzer.
“Those moments that define you as a man, I think those are the biggest moments — and there’s three that really stick out. For me, it’s my fight with [Ronaldo] ‘Jacare’ [Souza]. It made me whole. It made me a man. That gave me relevance in life. And then the stages of the game, there’s always goals within goals, and then there was the fight with [Chris] Weidman. Doing that and achieving that height, you know?
And then coming back and doing this [against Costa], proving it to myself that — where I needed to go after losing track of myself, letting society kind of direct what I should want, what I thought I want, and then having to come back down to reality and figure out what the f*** I want really.
I had to lose myself to come back, and now we’re going to f****** show people, show people the truth. That’s how I saw it.” What do you think of Luke Rockhold’s comments? Let us know in the comments.
