Before Dan Hooker
left the Octagon following his first-round knockout loss to
Michael
Chandler at
UFC 257, he left his gloves in the cage — normally the
universal signal that a fighter is calling it a career.
In his first public comments since that defeat, Hooker told
Submission
Radio that he was simply caught up in the frustration of the
moment. He isn’t, however, ready to give up on his MMA career just
yet. In fact, once things had time to settle down, Hooker says the
loss wasn’t any more upsetting than his five-round decision defeat
to Dustin
Poirier last June.
“You’re always frustrated after a loss,” Hooker said (transcription
via
MMAFighting.com). “[It was] a balance of everything. Sheer
frustration, you’re disappointed, and in that moment I was like,
‘I’m done. I’m finished with this s—-y sport. I’m done.’ Then you
get back to the hotel and you think about it and you realize you’re
not good at anything else either, so it’s like well, “I’ve kind of
painted myself into a bit of a corner here.’
“People think you’re gonna be rolling around in depression and not
getting out of bed, but I know what it is. This is a sport I’ve
been doing and following for my entire adult life. It’s always a
possibility. A loss like this, you’re not rolling around in
depression, super upset. It’s self-explanatory. It is what it is. I
can honestly say I’m not any more upset than when I lost the
Poirier fight.”
Hooker was on the defensive from the outset in the bout, and
Chandler floored him with a right hand to the body followed by a
massive left hook to the head. Follow-up punches on the canvas
spelled an end to “The Hangman’s” night 2:30 into Round 1. Hooker
couldn’t have imagined a worse scenario on what is likely to be one
of the biggest cards of 2021 — hence his silence until now.
“To be honest, I had nothing to say,” Hooker said. “Like a week
went past and what can you say? What can you say? You have good
days and bad days. You go into these kind of things and you prepare
yourself for worst case scenarios, but even that took the cake.
Even then it surprised me how bad it went. That was the very
surprising thing. So I was like, what can you say? I had no words
to describe it. You come to and then you’re just like, I’ve just
wasted four months of my life for that.”
As far as analyzing his performance, Hooker chalks the KO loss up
to simply not reacting properly to Chandler’s attacks.
“That’s like the funny thing, zigged and should’ve zagged,” Hooker
said. “That’s all it is. Fighting is like a mixture of thinking and
your reactions. You’re balancing your process thought and then your
reactions. I felt like I was calm, could see everything, was
thinking, was sharp in there. I just relied on my reactions to get
out of the way of that punch and it let me down. It’s hard to
describe. It’s such an obvious error and such a very costly
mistake.
“He changed levels. I think I relied on my reaction time. He sold
the level change well. I thought he was going for a takedown, comes
upstairs with a punch. There’s a million things I could’ve done
that would’ve changed that. There’s a million different reactions
that I could’ve done and that not happen. But it did. What can you
do? I certainly don’t have a time machine. I think Floyd
Mayweather has a time machine. If anyone has a time machine,
Floyd Mayweather has a time machine. I do not have a time
machine.”