Mayhem says Venator loss was ‘re-awakening’ for him, wants to change his ‘whole life’

After years of continuous public scandals and police arrests, missing weight by 24 pounds and losing via rear-naked choke during a comeback attempt last Saturday, Jason “Mayhem” Miller vows to finally change his life.

“If you don’t learn from an experience, that’s ’cause you haven’t thought about it long enough,” Miller explained post-fight in an interview with MMANews.pl. “Look, it’s only been about an hour and I already thought a lot about this. I have an idea of where to start to change my whole life.”

Miller was scheduled to face fellow UFC veteran Luke Barnatt in a middleweight title fight that was supposed to headline Venator FC 3 in Milan, Italy. The 35-year old, however, showed up at 209 pounds and was immediately scratched from the co-main event. He eventually faced relatively unknown local fighter Mattia Shiavolin instead, but lost the fight via second-round submission.

“I don’t like to make any excuses. I pride myself on being able to fight anyone at any time,” Mayhem said. “Mattia really cranked it up tonight. I felt like I was winning, but then I was losing. Suddenly I lost. I’m kinda shaking some ring rust off. It was a hard way to learn it in front of a beautiful Italian crowd, but I feel this is kind of a re-awakening of the Mayhem. I felt a positive feeling that I haven’t felt the longest time. So despite the loss I’m being hopeful for the future.”

Regardless of the devastating loss and how totally unprofessional he handled his weight-cut, Mayhem obviously still can see a silver lining after last weekend. In fact, the 39-fight veteran seems to be off to a new start.

“You can see by my performance, it wasn’t a complete loss,” he said. “I had my moments of goodness, but overall I see that there’s a lot to be fixed. I’ll go back to the drawing board, tweak some things, figure some things out. I had a lot of fun, but not as much fun as I could have had.

“I have a lot to work on, now I have a starting point. I haven’t been in front of a crowd in four years. That was a big thing, because of that excitement. […] A lot of things went wrong. But I’m still Mayhem, still here, and you can’t kill Mayhem!”