Michael Chandler remains undeterred.
For the past 19 months, Chandler has been waiting on a fight with Conor McGregor. The two were supposed to face off in the main event of UFC 303; unfortunately, that changed last week when McGregor withdrew from the event due to injury. Now Chandler once again finds himself playing the waiting game, hoping for a swift recovery and return for McGregor, and on Monday he released a video addressing the situation and his reaction to the unfortunate change of events.
“I got the rug pulled out from underneath me at the last possible moment,” Chandler said. “I just had got done with my last sparring session, Thursday morning, had been hearing rumblings since Monday, obviously, but really got the call about an hour after my last sparring session was completed. An hour after a celebration.
“Anybody who has trained for a fight or anybody who has gone through a training camp for something, you go through a really hard block and then, in order to peak, you get toward the very end, you don’t go hard anymore, as to throw yourself into the fire and take the chance of injuries, over training, bumps, bruises, cuts, all those different things. I had just gotten done with that. The happiest and healthiest, hardest to kill, most dangerous man I have ever been in my entire life, in that moment. To 30 minutes later getting a phone call that all of that was for naught.”
While this is certainly a terrible turn of events for Chandler, it’s not all bad. The fight has not been cancelled, merely postponed, with the idea being to re-book the matchup later this year when McGregor recovers. Granted, UFC CEO Dana White says he’s not committing to anything until McGregor is fully recovered, but Chandler still has reason to hope that, eventually, he will get the fight he’s been chasing since signing with the UFC in 2020.
And Chandler certainly seems like he’s going to hold onto that hope.
“So what do I do now?” Chandler mused. “A little bit of uncertainty in my life. When’s this fight going to happen? What date would it be re-booked for? What venue? How bad is the injury? Reports have come out that it’s not that bad, just needs a little bit of a delay. But still, no guarantees. But I thrive when there are no guarantees. Just a walk-on kid from High Ridge, Mo., who has continued to trod in a forward trajectory no matter what the opposition, no matter what the circumstances, no matter what the situation. It’s not up to me to will outcomes into existence. It is up to me to do the work. We let the work talk. We do the work. And we do the work until we become undeniable.
“Don’t you dare disrespect me by feeling sorry for me. Don’t you dare disrespect me by having any kind of sympathy. Be emboldened by my situation. Be emboldened by my steadfastness and my immovability, of hitching my dreams to a shooting star and continuing to move forward. If you’ve been on this journey with me for a long time, you know how I operate. You know where my mindset is, where my mental is. And it is nowhere near down in the dumps. I am emboldened by this test, and this test ain’t done yet. And this test shall turn into part of my testimony. So we keep moving forward in the face of adversity, with complete disregard to previous failures, previous setbacks, previous things outside of out control, and future opposition.”
Chandler last fought at UFC 281, where he was submitted by Dustin Poirier in the third round.
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