I fought tall fighters, short fighters, strong fighters, slow fighters, sluggers and boxers. It was either learn or get knocked off.
If it wasn't for us fighters, who have carried the sport on our backs since the very beginning... without fighters there is no fight, there's no event, and no show.
Bellator is open to a fighters union - fighters binding together to see what's in our best interest. That's something you can't even breathe about elsewhere. I think it's a good thing for myself and other fighters to have that.
Trust me, I've seen a lot of fighters come in hot and they disappear faster than they came in after a loss or two. This is the UFC and the best fighters in the world are here. If you fight the great fighters you're bound to lose.
If promoters figure out a way to keep the fighters happy then those fighters will tell other fighters and that promotion will win.
If I look at the fighters that are coming through, fighters like Carl Froch for instance, do I worry about fighters like that? Course not, I could eat them for breakfast.
Anderson Silva, Georges Saint-Pierre, and Rodrigo Nogueira are some of the top fighters in the UFC among many other great fighters. The UFC has many of the toughest fighters around.
The promotions put fighters against each other, and they don't want to pay anything to them. If you refuse to fight, the promoter shows up - and sometimes he wants to show off more than the fighters. This is a shame.
Some fighters know when to stop on their own and go on to something else, and then some fighters have nothing to go back to after they are finished. Some fighters still have the burning fire and feel that they just need to try one more time. Few can do it.
A lot of the time you have good fighters with good records, some top-class fighters, and they do some kind of crazy stuff, and there's nothing that you can do to stop them from doing it. That's the hardest part of training others.
Maybe when I'm done fighting, I'll open a gym and manage fighters and train fighters.
Young fighters dream of the future. Old fighters seek to recapture the past.
Fighters who speak disparagingly about fighters from years gone by do us all a disservice. It is treacherous.
Actually, when I fought in PRIDE, we had the best fighters in the world. Back then, the UFC had a very serious and big crisis; they were going through some tough times trying to get top fighters. All the best fighters were in PRIDE.
You hear a lot from the other fighters that have fought in Denver, you see some of the fighters are just gassing out.
I've seen a lot of the great fighters, so I've always been a fan of the Puerto Rican fighters and I'm happy to be one myself.