Bryan Battle has been in impressive form since moving down to the welterweight division and ahead of his UFC Paris matchup this weekend, he has explained why he is no longer the ‘Pooh Bear’.
Along with moving down to 170lbs in 2022, Bryan Battle also went away with his previous nickname, ‘Pooh Bear’ and decided to pick something a little more fitting.
Ahead of his UFC Paris fight against Kevin Jousset this coming Saturday, Battle is hoping to continue his undefeated run and put himself closer to the top 15.
Bryan Battle talks about constantly being compared to Charles Oliveira
During his time on The Ultimate Fighter, the 30-year-old donned long curly dark hair, but since then, has had a change of style and now dons a short bleach-blonde look, similar to Charles Oliveira.
Bizarrely enough, Battle has explained that he constantly gets stopped by MMA fans who tell him he looks like ‘Do Bronx’, not knowing that he is a UFC fighter.
“Look good, feel good, fight good. I get that a lot (that I look like Charles Oliveira), it’s the blonde hair and the tattoos, you know what I’m saying,” Battle began to explain at the UFC Paris media day.
“And the skin complexion too, it’s not something I was necessarily trying to do, but it’s funny, people who don’t know who I am, people come up to me like, ‘Hey, hey, you look just like Charles Oliveira’, they don’t know that I fight or anything… I’m like sh*t, I know, I know,” he continued.
Bryan Battle explains why he changed his nickname to ‘The Butcher’
Despite it not being a stereotypical nickname in the fight world, Battle became well known for being called ‘Pooh Bear’, however, that all changed recently.
The 30-year-old changed his nickname to ‘The Butcher’, opting for something more fitting to his occupation, and he has explained the thought process behind the change.
“It was really just a shift in mentality, ‘Pooh Bear’ was something that I got as an amateur and that was just like a different guy at a different time.
“There was a point where I was about to go and fight Tresean (Gore) and I was in the back and I’m looking at all the killers in the back, Shavkat (Rakhmonov) was back there, a couple of other killers, and it really dawned on me that if I want to compete at the highest level I can’t be the same guy I’ve always been.
“I have to change, I have to be more ruthless (I thought), and so through that process, it was searching for who that person is, it was ‘The Butcher’, the butcher killed pooh bear,” Battle explained.
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