2013 hasn’t exactly been kind to Donald Cerrone. Aside from the loss to Anthony Pettis, he also fell while rock climbing and almost had to pull out of his UFC 160 bout with KJ Noons due to a fractured hip and foot.
Over at MMA Fighting, Shaun Al-Shatti — who is doing some of the best recent work in MMA media — caught up with Cerrone and discussed a number of topics, but his breakdown of the loss to Pettis and the after-effects of it stick out as particularly interesting:
“There was so much wrong going on in my head,” Cerrone thickly remembers. “I remember looking across the ring like, dang, I done pissed him off and he’s comin’ hard.
“It sucks. It really sucks losing, especially a fight like that. That’s my second time being up there for contendership and losing, going back to the end of the pile. … Emotionally you don’t want to talk to anybody. You don’t want to hear about it. You don’t want to see it. I remember going over to my grandma’s. We’re watchin’ it one time then we’re deleting it off the DVR and not talking about it again.”
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“It’s like, I don’t know if it’s the camera or the pressure, but I’ve got to figure that out,” Cerrone admits. “Whatever makes me fight hard to get there, and then I seem to, like, fold under pressure. I don’t know. I’m tryin’ to [figure it out]. I got a new sports psychologist tryin’ to work those kinks out.”
In addition to getting with a new sports psychologist to get to fighting “his fight,” Cerrone also discussed giving up candy which seems like it was a real issue in his diet.