Luke Thomas had a chance to sit down with Jorge Rivera as he prepares to face Michael Bisping at UFC 127. Personally, I haven’t found the “feud” between the two fighters to be all that interesting, I don’t like the goofy back and forth but it has gotten the fight a good amount of attention. Luke’s interview with Jorge avoids much of that goofiness and focuses more on the actual breakdown. Some quotes:
“I think Michael Bisping has a very good record. He’s known worldwide. He’s vocal. People know who he is. I think a fight with him will be a good, exciting fight and just like you said before, it’ll definitely catapult me and put my name right up there.”
…
“What I see in him, he doesn’t really have a lot of power in his strikes. I haven’t seen him knock out too many guys in the UFC and he runs a lot when he gets hit. I feel like I have a good game plan on how to stop what he’s good at and implement what I want to do and basically just do my thing.”
Also interesting was Rivera opening up about some of his difficulties in the past few years:
“There was a time in 2002 where I got separated and divorced from my wife and I spent I don’t know how many hours at the gym. That’s where I spent most of time,” Rivera said. “I wasn’t really doing much with it. I had a big fight coming up against Travis Lutter and I was actually praying about it. ‘If I don’t win this fight, man, I’m done. I’m going to have to go back working concrete’ or whatever because it just wasn’t paying off for me. As much as I love the sport, as much as I love to compete, it just wasn’t paying off for me. So I almost hung it up. But I won that fight and two months later I was in the UFC and since then things have been a lot happier for me.”
You can listen to the interview via the YouTube video below or check out the full article by Luke at SBNation.com/MMA