TORONTO — Mixed martial arts isn’t a team sport. It’s a ruthless, dog-eat-dog endeavour where the athlete must, to a certain extent, be selfish in order to reach his or her full potential.
It’s commonplace for fighters at or near the top of their division to surround themselves with a team that caters to their needs and has their best interests in mind.
If you’re former UFC lightweight champion Anthony Pettis, desperate for a win following the first two-fight losing streak of your career, you have to be open to broadening your horizons. One way to do that is by working with different coaches and different training partners.
So, in order to prepare for his UFC 197 bout with Edson Barboza, Pettis turned to a former rival for help. The 29-year-old former Wheaties cover athlete joined forces with Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone at the famous Jackson-Winkeljohn MMA Academy in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
“Initially I went for only four days and ended up staying for three weeks,” Pettis told Sportsnet. “It was a great experience. I got a whole new look at mixed martial arts. A totally different training style, totally different body types and it just made me fall back in love with that training. I think that’s what I was looking for. Something that got me back into having fun.”
Pettis’s full-time coach is Duke Roufus. They train together at Roufusport in Milwaukee, Pettis’s home town. Roufus will corner Pettis on fight night like always, but you often have to mix up your strategy in the cage so why not do the same in training camps rather than repeating a stagnant routine fight after fight?
“Their coaching style is way different than Duke’s coaching style and I got to go in there and take it all in,” Pettis said of Greg Jackson and Mike Winkeljohn.
The venture was orchestrated by Israel Martinez, the acclaimed wrestling coach of Pettis, Jon Jones and many other elite MMA stars. Jones, who headlines Saturday’s event, is Martinez’s best student and the top dog at the Jackson-Winkeljohn gym, so if Pettis wanted to work with Martinez ahead of UFC 197 then he had to go out to Albuquerque.
Watch UFC 197 Saturday, April 23 live on Sportsnet Pay Per View
He also wanted to get some quality sparring in and Cerrone was an ideal foil for Pettis considering the fact “Cowboy” is a dynamic striker like Barboza and holds a victory over the Brazilian.
Pettis and Cerrone fought three years ago. The fight ended quickly courtesy of a stiff left kick from Pettis that caused Cerrone’s ribs and internal organs to say “no thanks.”
There was no ill will after the fight but it’s not like the two became friends. That changed earlier this year when they spent eight days together on a USO tour.
“Initially I was like, ‘Ugh I have to spend eight days with this guy? We’ll see how this goes.’ By the end of the trip, I mean we’re pretty good friends now,” Pettis explained. “When [two people] fight you have a lot of similarities and a lot of stuff that you can relate to. We pushed past the fight. We fought already and he’s moving up to welterweight so that moves him out of my weight class. It was good training for both of us. I got some rounds in with him the first day. The whole gym was watching. It was cool.”
“He’s a good fighter, man. When I fought him [in 2013] it was a quick fight. It was a quick knockout to the body, but sparring him I got to feel his skills everywhere and he’s definitely got some skills, man. Everybody there was so cool and the atmosphere I just felt like I was learning a lot. That was the atmosphere I was looking for.”
Pettis first became a true star when he defeated Benson Henderson to win the WEC lightweight title in December 2010. His performance in that fight garnered worldwide attention after he pulled off one of the most spectacular moves in MMA history. In the last minute of the last round of the last fight in WEC history (that promotion was enveloped by the UFC following the event) Pettis did this…
The move will live on in MMA infamy, as will a highlight-reel KO from Barboza. Thirteen months after the “Showtime Kick,” Barboza put Terry Etim to sleep with a spinning wheel kick that is widely considered the greatest knockout in UFC history.
Maybe it’s unfair to assume we’re going to see craziness at UFC 197 like we did in the moves above, but with a stylistic matchup as tantalizing as Pettis-Barboza it’s safe to say the matchup has potential to produce fireworks.
In his last two fights, Pettis lost his UFC title to Rafael dos Anjos via lopsided unanimous decision then dropped a split decision to Eddie Alvarez in a frustrating bout where Alvarez was able to pin Pettis along the cage. Barboza doesn’t mix up his game the way dos Anjos and Alvarez do. He’s a striker. He strikes. It’s a refreshing change of pace for Pettis.
“When it comes to striking I’m never cautious unless these guys are trying to hold me down or wrestle me,” Pettis said. “When it’s a striking exchange, both of us have been doing this our whole lives so if he’s throwing a spin kick, I’ve seen a million spin kicks. I’m sure he’s seen a million spin kicks, so it’s going to be a chess match of who can out position the other guy and get this guy.
“I think Edson is definitely the guy that’s going to push me in the striking aspect, but at the same time who knows what to expect? He comes from Alvarez’s camp as well so our job was to fix those little holes in my game.”
LISTEN: Anthony Pettis talks UFC 197, Conor McGregor, Nate Diaz, Jon Jones & more
If taking on a striker the calibre of Barboza wasn’t daunting enough a task, Pettis will also have to manage the pressure of fighting on the same card as his younger brother, rising flyweight star Sergio Pettis, who meets Canadian Chris Kelades in the featured preliminary bout. This will mark the third time in 17 months the Pettis brothers have competed on the same card. They were both victorious at UFC 181 – they each earned post-fight bonuses that night as well – but at UFC 185 Sergio was knocked out on the preliminary card and Pettis was dominated by dos Anjos.
Instead of avoiding a similar situation, they decided to tackle it head on.
“I had to erase that. I don’t like to have any superstitions when I fight,” Pettis added. “I can’t say or do anything to change the outcome of Serge’s fight. Whatever’s going to happen is already there. I can only control what happens in my fight and that’s where I’m kind of going with this mindset.”
