At the MMA post-fight conference, Frank Mir admitted that he let his emotions get the best of him when the his fight Todd Duffee drew nearer. He said, “I was trying to be more intelligent, but today my emotions got the better of me leading up to the fight. I just bit down on my mouthpiece and wanted to make a statement,”. “I kept hearing ‘old’ and ‘crafty’, so I guess I was kind of dumb tonight and just decided to show ‘young’ and ‘brash’,” he added.
Before the fight started, Mir noticeably passed up on shaking hands with Duffee to exude some sort of toughness and intimidation. Good thing Mir was able to succeed in defeating Duffee towards the end of the fight. His aggressive style was effective enough to fight off Duffee’s kicks and blows. These impressive moves can be the result of intense training with previous champs like Bermane Stiverne, who was once a boxing world champion.
“When someone’s coming at you like a bull, you’ve got to go forward. I expected to be more technical tonight. I felt a little less than technical tonight. It’s going to make people wonder now — I can come out there and I can fight hard like a young bull or I can still be the matador,” Mir said.
During the mixed martial arts post-fight interview, he also mentioned that heavyweights eventually mature as they grow older. He further said, “You see it even in college wrestling, you don’t see a lot of freshmen in the heavyweight division become NCAA champions, like you do in the other weight classes. So you see it a lot of times that we come upon ourselves older.”.
Mir was known in the UFC to be the most dangerous submission fighter in the industry. This time around, he was able to further boost his career by defeating Todd Duffee with a powerful one-punch knockout in round 1 under two minutes.
Before his winning 2-0 knockout streak, which neither lasted more than two minutes in the first round, Miff nearly considered retirement. He had let go of four fights consecutively and he took a year-long break to let his body heal. Mir has been in the mixed martial arts industry for 14 years; he has been a former champion two times in his career as well. At the age of 36, Mir looked very fresh and looked like a completely reborn fighter this year. With this fight, the heavyweight champion was able to prove that at 36 years old, he can still put up a good fight. And with this winning, Mir was able to tie for the second-most finishes in UFC history and the fourth-most wins.
Rumors had it that MMA fighter Mir did not even show much interest when he was lined up against Duffee, mainly because the heavyweight champion knew that Duffee was not in the top 10 list of fighters and would not make much difference in his career.
With Mir’s winning streak and undefeated record, he might be anticipating some opponents lining up to fight him before the year ends.