At UFC 194, Chris Weidman lost his Middleweight title to Luke Rockhold. On Monday, he broke his silence on The MMA Hour.
"It was just a great experience for me. I could play back a million things in that fight I could've done differently, but I'm really happy I lost. I feel like if I would've won that fight, if I would've somehow figured a way to beat him up, I wouldn't have the opportunity that I have now to grow as a fighter and truly reach my potential. Now I feel like I have the freedom to change things that I've wanted to change for years. You don't want to fix things that aren't broken, so that kind of stops you from make changes. But now I feel more free than I've ever felt to change the things and do things that I wanted to do without feeling like I'm cursing myself, so I feel great. I'm real excited about the future. I feel like it's just going to create a whole different monster inside of me, and I'm excited to go out there and fight again."
"It's one of those things," Weidman said. "I felt weird in camp. The lack of excitement -- and I'm not making any excuses, I trained hard -- but the lack of excitement about it, I just couldn't trick myself into being extremely excited about it, for whatever reason.
"It was a slow thing. You kind of feel, like these little things that are off during camp, and then you walk to the cage and feel a little off, and then you lose. It was surreal. It was just weird losing. But then shortly after, you realize: you know what, this is part of the plan. This is what was meant to happen. He was a better man that night, and there's a million things in my mind that I know could've gone differently and I could've done differently during camp and in the fight.
"But I have no regrets," Weidman continued. "I really don't. Because now... now I have the ability to come back better. If I would've won that fight, I don't think my improvement from fight to fight would've been there. I think I would've stuck with the same things, the ‘if it's not broke, don't fix it.' Being undefeated for that long of a time, you just don't feel a need to change things. So I now I have that gift, to be able to just be free, and whatever I feel I need to do, I can do without second guessing myself."
Weidman made a point to state that he has no intentions of changing teams, and that his Long Island crew at Serra-Longo are "family."
His lack of regrets, though, extends even to the sequence that many have pointed to as the turning point of the fight. Midway through an otherwise tight contest, Weidman missed a sloppy wheel kick attempt, which allowed Rockhold to take the fight to the floor and advance into mount. The beginning of the end came from there, as Rockhold unloaded with hard shots and badly damaged the champion.
"I don't regret doing that, because I'm happy I lost," Weidman reiterated. "Everybody has been talking about the kick, and I do feel like I was winning the fight, but I was running on like two cylinders and I feel like I deserved to lose that fight, and I'm happy I did. I just felt like he was circling that way and I just felt I could go for a spinning back kick. He capitalized on it, he took me down. But that doesn't mean it should be the end of the fight for me.
"It's not the spinning back kick that I'm really critical on myself about. Was it a pretty spinning back kick? Did it change the momentum of the fight? Definitely. But there's things that I should've been doing that I didn't do as soon as I hit the ground, and there's reasons I didn't, and there's things that I'm excited about to change, to do things differently."
LINK: Chris Weidman breaks silence after UFC 194: ‘I'm really happy I lost'
