UFC bantamweight champion Sean O’Malley is not terribly surprised to hear former middleweight title holder Sean Strickland admit mental health issues.
Strickland this past month told his social media followers that despite having everything he wants, he sometimes feels “mentally unwell” and a danger to others. O’Malley believes the ex-champ may be spending too much time taking punishment, he said earlier this week on his video podcast, TimboSugar Show.
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“It’s like, duh,” O’Malley said. “Anyone that says that they literally have a [desire] to kill people probably aren’t doing mentally well. You either love or you hate, and if you want to kill people for no reason. … I mean, he’s honest about it, which is f****** pretty crazy.
“Just going in there and sparring and getting hit in the head — not that he gets hit that much, but if you’re getting hit not that much, but you spar every day, that adds up.”
Strickland’s message appears to be for a purpose as he tells his fans he “wanted to share this and remind you you’re not alone.” It’s still a startling admission for an active UFC fighter and former champ with a massive fan base.
“All week, I’ve been on the Twitter saying crazy s***, just spiraling,” Strickland said in his post. “I woke up and I told my girl, I was like, ‘Babe, I feel like… I feel like a danger to people. I don’t feel like I should be out in the world, you know?’ And I think that I have everything — I’m rich, I’m famous, like I have everything I ever f****** wanted, and I still am mentally unwell. And I get in these mindsets where like I want to burn everything down in the world. Like I want to have nothing, so I can just f****** lose it and just take out everything on people.
“And I think that like you guys, in a weird way, are like my family. Like I’ve shared some s*** with you guys, and you guys have shared some s*** with me that like, I feel more connected with my fans than I think most people feel, just because we’ve gone through a lot together. And man, you know, I have everything I want and I still struggle with mental health. And my memory is so short that like when I go out to this week, I think to myself — like, once I get past it, I think to myself, ‘Man, that was a really rough time in my life.’
“But then when I really think about it, this happens multiple times a month, every month, you know. … I don’t know why I’m telling you guys this, I’ve just been kind of going through some s***. I’m fine, I’ll be fine.”
The fighting world never fails to surprise us and it did so again when Mike Tyson’s return to boxing was announced in a clash against the controversial Jake Paul.
Aside from one exhibition bout which saw him battle to a draw against Roy Jones Jr. back in 2020, Tyson hasn’t stepped into the squared circle since 2006—with his last professional fight coming in June 2005. Despite being out of the game for so long, the 57-year-old continues to be one of the biggest names in all of combat sports.
He is respected by many for his dominant past in the ring and Mike Tyson himself believes that he is still a huge draw regardless of his age.
“I’m 58 and what? I’m getting billions of views from just talking to somebody about fighting,” Tyson told Reuters. “Everybody, even most of the athletes, they’re jealous. That’s whack.”
“I say in your prime, you couldn’t draw a million people, man. What are you talking [about]? You couldn’t sell out an arena. Who at 58 could sell out an 80,000-seat arena?”
Comparing himself to other potential opponents, Tyson detailed why he thinks Jake Paul chose to face him ahead of anybody else.
“Why [do] you think he wants to fight me and not anybody else? Everybody wants to fight him, all the boxers want to fight him.”
Related: Mike Tyson vs. Jake Paul set for July 20
“But, if he fought them, the only people that will come are the people that like him. The other guys, their parents might not even come watch them. That’s just keeping it real. They’re too boring for their children to watch, it’s like watching grass grow.”
Jake Paul is exuding confidence ahead of the bout and both he and Mike Tyson expect to get the job done via knockout. Whether you love him or hate him, Jake’s ability to put on huge events is second to none right now.
The collision will take place on Saturday, July 20. The pair will meet in the AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas and the fight will be available to all Netflix subscribers.
MMA Fighting has a live stream watch party for UFC 200, which took place July 9, 2016 at the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas in the middle of the craziest year in UFC history. MMA Fighting takes a look back at the historic pay-per-view event on the road to UFC 300 on April 13. After one of the wildest fight weeks ever, the main event became Miesha Tate defending her bantamweight title against Amanda Nunes.
Join MMA Fighting’s Mike Heck and E. Casey Leydon, along special guests Shaun Al-Shatti and José Youngs to watch along with the memorable UFC 200 main card. Additionally, the panel will share stories from covering the event live, how UFC 200 went from Nate Diaz vs. Conor McGregor 2, to Jon Jones vs. Daniel Cormier 2, to Tate vs. Nunes as the main event, and much more.
In the co-main event, former UFC heavyweight champion Brock Lesnar returns to the octagon for the first time in nearly five years to face Mark Hunt, while Cormier remained on the card to face former middleweight champion Anderson Silva — who took the fight on two days’ notice.
UFC 200 also features an interim featherweight title fight between José Aldo and Frankie Edgar, along with former heavyweight champ Cain Velasquez facing Travis Browne in the main card opener.
Watch MMA Fighting’s UFC 200 Watch Party at 8 p.m. ET / 5 p.m. PT.
Photo by Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
Jim Miller thought he was done.
It was 2016, and a multitude of health issues not only affected his training and preparation, but the results in Miller’s fights weren’t helping much either. As he stumbled through a 1-3 octagon skid, the longtime veteran began readying for a showdown with Diego Sanchez at UFC 196, and he couldn’t help but shake the feeling that the writing was the wall.
His MMA career was coming to end sooner than he expected.
“I was not having a go of it,” Miller told MMA Fighting ahead of his UFC 300 return against Bobby Green. “2015 was pretty hard on me, in the gym and I didn’t know what was going on. I thought it was, ‘Hey, you’ve been a professional fighter for the last 10 years, this is what it’s supposed be like. Your knees hurt. You’ve got nerve issues and numbness and stuff. Yeah, you’re going to have memory problems.’
“I’ve only been knocked unconscious twice in my life — it’s been inside the octagon. It’s never happened in training, so it’s not like I take a ton of damage in training. I am a wrestler and I lead with my head, so we knew at that point too that it’s the little bumps, like from football, it’s all of that stuff. It’s not necessarily the big jarring shots that you know it and you feel it. It’s those little bumps that do add up. I figured this was all just from being a professional fighter for a decade. This is what I’m going to have to deal with.”
But just days before his fight with Sanchez, Miller received a call from his doctor that finally explained why his health had taken a sudden and dramatic nosedive.
Miller was diagnosed with Lyme disease, an infection spread by ticks that causes a myriad of health issues, including fever, headache, and fatigue. When left untreated, the issues can spread to joints, the heart, and even the nervous system. The diagnosis quickly explained all of the problems that Miller had been dealing with, but he still didn’t know how long it would take for treatment to actually make a difference for him.
That’s why, after booking his next fight several months later at UFC 200, Miller was ready to call it quits for good.
“I was diagnosed two or three days prior to that event,” Miller explained. “I was out in Las Vegas when I got the phone call from my doctor saying he thought I had Lyme disease. So it was like, I fought Diego [Sanchez], I came back and started my medication and my protocol, and I was like, ‘Well, aright, let’s ask to be on UFC 200.’
“If this is it, if I can get out of this, then we’ll see where it takes me. If I can’t, if the next couple of weeks are as bad as the last year and a half have been, then I was willing to take my gloves off in the octagon at UFC 200.”
Miller didn’t launch into his training camp thinking his career was on borrowed time, but he also knew there needed to be a dramatic difference in his physical condition if he was going to continue fighting beyond UFC 200.
He openly addressed the possibility that he might call it a career at the historic event, because that’s just how bad his health had gotten after leaving the Lyme disease untreated.
“Fortunately, I responded really quickly to the antibiotics,” Miller said. “It was one of those things when you’re at 20 percent and you go to 30 percent, you’re like, ‘Man, this is amazing!’ You feel like you’re on top of the world, but it was a long, slow climb out. It did take a lot longer than I thought it was going to.
“But I was prepared. I was ready. I had already made that decision. That’s why I felt so comfortable talking about it, the last eight years, because I had made that decision. I had made the decision to walk away from the sport. Fortunately, a majority of the issues I was dealing with was from something unassociated with being a fighter and the lifestyle that I lead.”
With the possibility of retirement looming large over UFC 200, Miller was still unbelievably excited for the chance to share the octagon with a legend like Takanori Gomi.
There was a time not long before they met that Gomi was considered the No. 1 lightweight in the world across every promotion. Miller recognizes that wasn’t the same Gomi he faced at UFC 200, but he never scoffed at the opportunity to clash with an all-time great.
“Even before I started training, before the UFC even brought back lightweight, he was the best lightweight guy on the planet,” Miller said. “I remember it was Takanori Gomi and Vitor ‘Shaolin’ [Ribeiro]. These two guys are just awesome.
“Years later, I fought Takanori Gomi and I get to train with Vitor. This is amazing. It was awesome to hear that name. I understand at that point, the mileage on that guy’s body, he wasn’t the same guy that made me fall in love with the sport. He was not that same fighter and I know that, but it was cool to get the opportunity to share the octagon with him. I wish it was when we were both in our primes, but it’s the way it goes. We weren’t. I sure as s*** know that I wasn’t at that point in my life. It was cool to get to fight him.”
Mostly healthy and nearly recovered from the effects of the Lyme disease, Miller needed less than three minutes to knock out Gomi and put his career back on track. It was a stunning turn of events, but more importantly it signaled that Miller really was on his way back after having years robbed from him while he was sick and just didn’t know it.
Without the doctors that finally diagnosed his Lyme disease, Miller knows he would’ve retired at UFC 200 — and that would’ve prevented him from adding a whole slew of accolades to his résumé since that event in 2016.
“If I had called it quits at [UFC] 200, the records and the talks that we have about potential Hall of Fame, they don’t happen,” Miller said. “Now, granted, had I not gotten bit by a tick, who knows where I would have been at that point too. I was ranked No. 6 or something like that at one point. The things that I dealt with, they definitely pulled me down.
“Fortunately, I was able to overcome it, and the biggest thing for me was knowing that I was going to fight. I was getting beat up everyday and I didn’t know if I needed to be preparing everyday and getting one-percent better in that realm. Finding out that I had an opponent that was kicking my butt behind the curtain was huge, and just knowing that made it a lot easier to deal with it.”
Even now, at age 40, as he approaches his return at UFC 300, Miller says the same rules apply now as they once did at UFC 200.
For as much has changed eight years later, nothing has changed.
“For me, it’s always been the training camp,” Miller said. “Fight night’s hard, fight week’s hard, but it’s a very short period of time. It’s those six, eight weeks leading up to a fight where you’re kicking your own ass, that’s the hard part. That’s the grind. The fight is the reward.
“I knew with how those few weeks leading up to that fight went and how different they were from my previous few camps that, OK, we can still do this. It wasn’t necessarily the results in the octagon that were driving me to retire. It was the months leading up to a fight. That’s the same thing today.”
Fast-rising flyweight contender Manon Fiorot won her twelfth straight fight last weekend atop the UFC Atlantic City fight card, knocking around “Cold Blooded” Erin Blanchfield for the better part of five rounds on ESPN. As a result, “The Beast” was promoted in two categories in the latest UFC rankings update, rising two spots to No. 4 on the women’s pound-for-pound chart and one slot to No. 2 at 125 pounds.
That’s not all.
Joaquin Buckley debuted on the welterweight list thanks to his technical knockout victory over fading veteran Vicente Luque in the UFC Atlantic City co-main event. “New Mansa” is currently tied with longtime veteran Neil Magny at No. 11 on the 170-pound chart, sending “The Silent Assassin” down three spots to No. 14.
Here’s how UFC compiles its official rankings:
Rankings were generated by a voting panel made up of media members. The media members were asked to vote for who they feel are the top fighters in the UFC by weight-class and pound-for-pound. A fighter is only eligible to be voted on if they are in active status in the UFC. A fighter can appear in more than one weight division at a time. The champion and interim champion are considered to be in the top positions of their respective divisions and therefore are not eligible for voting by weight-class. However, the champions can be voted on for the pound-for-pound rankings.
Take a look at what the latest rankings field looks like courtesy of UFC.com. Note: (+/- = movement in rankings, T = tie, *NR = Not previously ranked).
MEN’S POUND-FOR-POUND
1. Islam Makhachev 2. Jon Jones 3. Leon Edwards 4. Alex Pereira 5. Ilia Topuria 6. Sean O’Malley 7. Charles Oliveira 8. Alexander Volkanovski 9. Dricus Du Plessis 10. Alexandre Pantoja 11. Israel Adesanya 12. Tom Aspinall 13. Sean Strickland 14. Max Holloway 15. Aljamain Sterling
FLYWEIGHT
Champion: Alexandre Pantoja
1. Brandon Royval 2. Brandon Moreno 3. Amir Albazi 4. Kai Kara France 5. Matheus Nicolau 6. Manel Kape 7. Muhammad Mokaev 8. Alex Perez 9. Tim Elliott 10. Steve Erceg 11. Matt Schnell 12. Tagir Ulanbekov 13. Tatsuro Taira 14. David Dvorak +1 15. Su Mudaerji -1
BANTAMWEIGHT
Champion: Sean O’Malley
1. Merab Dvalishvili 2. Aljamain Sterling 3. Cory Sandhagen 4. Petr Yan 5. Marlon Vera 6. Henry Cejudo 7. Song Yadong 8. Deiveson Figueiredo 9. Rob Font 10. Umar Nurmagomedov 11. Kyler Phillips 12. Dominick Cruz 13. Mario Bautista 14. Jonathan Martinez 15. Pedro Munhoz
FEATHERWEIGHT
Champion: Ilia Topuria
1. Alexander Volkanovski 2. Max Holloway 3. Brian Ortega 4. Yair Rodriguez 5. Movsar Evloev 6. Arnold Allen 7. Josh Emmett 8. Calvin Kattar 9. Giga Chikadze 10. Bryce Mitchell 11. Edson Barboza 12. Dan Ige 13. Sodiq Yusuff 14. Lerone Murphy 15. Alex Caceres
LIGHTWEIGHT
Champion: Islam Makhachev
1. Charles Oliveira 2. Justin Gaethje 3. Dustin Poirier 4. Arman Tsarukyan 5. Mateusz Gamrot 6. Michael Chandler 7. Beneil Dariush 8. Rafael Fiziev 9. Dan Hooker 10. Jalin Turner 11. Benoit Saint-Denis 12. Rafael dos Anjos 13. Renato Moicano 14. Bobby Green 15. Drew Dober
WELTERWEIGHT
Champion: Leon Edwards
1. Kamaru Usman 2. Belal Muhammed 3. Shavkat Rakhmonov 4. Colby Covington 5. Jack Della Maddalena 6. Gilbert Burns 7. Ian Machado Garry 8. Sean Brady 9. Stephen Thompson 10. Geoff Neal 11. (T) Neil Magny +1 11. (T) Joaquin Buckley *NR 13. Michael Page 14. Vicente Luque -3 15. Kevin Holland -1
MIDDLEWEIGHT
Champion: Dricus Du Plessis
1. Sean Strickland 2. Israel Adesanya 3. Robert Whittaker 4. Jared Cannonier 5. Marvin Vettori 6. Paulo Costa 7. Brendan Allen 8. Nassourdine Imavov 9. (T) Roman Dolidze 9. (T) Jack Hermansson 11. Khamzat Chimaev 12. Anthony Hernandez 13. Paul Craig 14. Chris Curtis 15. Caio Borralho
LIGHT HEAVYWEIGHT
Champion: Alex Pereira
1. Jamahal Hill 2. Jiri Prochazka 3. Magomed Ankalaev 4. Jan Blachowicz 5. Aleksandar Rakic 6. Nikita Krylov 7. Johnny Walker 8. Khalil Rountree 9. Volkan Oezdemir 10. Anthony Smith 11. Ryan Spann 12. Alonzo Menifield 13. Azamat Murzakanov 14. Dominick Reyes 15. Dustin Jacoby
HEAVYWEIGHT
Champion: Jon Jones
1. Tom Aspinall 2. Ciryl Gane 3. Sergei Pavlovich 4. Stipe Miocic 5. Curtis Blaydes 6. Alexander Volkov 7. Jailton Almeida 8. Marcin Tybura 9. Serghei Spivac 10. Tai Tuivasa 11. Jairzinho Rozenstruik 12. Derrick Lewis 13. Alexandr Romanov 14. Marcos Rogerio De Lima 15. Rodrigo Nascimento
1. Julianna Pena 2. (T) Mayra Bueno Silva 2. (T) Ketlen Vieira 4. Irene Aldana 5. Holly Holm 6. Macy Chiasson 7. Miesha Tate 8. Karol Rosa 9. Pannie Kianzad 10. Yana Santos 11. Norma Dumont 12. Julia Avila 13. Chelsea Chandler 14. Josiane Nunes 15. Melissa Dixon
You can expect these rankings to change around this time next week, particularly in the middleweight division, following the UFC Vegas 90: “Allen vs. Curtis 2” mixed martial arts (MMA) event on ESPN+, scheduled for this Sat. night (April 6, 2024) at APEX in Las Vegas.
For much more on that upcoming fight card click here.
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