Bobby Lashley is a long-standing pro wrestler. However, it was not until recently that it seemed like he might find success in MMA.
On Wednesday, the new WWE Champion spoke out on The MMA Hour about his decision to retire from MMA despite having won fights in major promotions such as Strikeforce and Bellator.
“I think because when I came into it, I came into it with the wrong mind frame,” Lashley said. “When I originally came into fighting, I came into it saying I want to do one fight. After winning one fight I was able to win another, which led me to all the other things that were being thrown at my head. The hardest thing with me with fighting was I had all these fights, I think I had 18, 19 fights, something like that, there was some that were kind of like smaller fights that didn’t really get put on my Sherdog record, but I didn’t ever have an actual training camp. I have never been to a training camp.
“I was thinking, “Man, could we run for the title?” I want to run for the title.’ I’m a single father, so I had my kids, and I what I was literally doing is I was having to run down to [train with Josh] Barnett. I did some work with Barnett, I was running down to American Top Team and I would be there for a week. Then I needed to go home with my children. I would then run back, and Josh would meet me for sparring. My camps were so difficult and you need a plan to move up in the ranks. You’ve really got to have a team, you’ve really got to have everything together.”
Lashley mentioned that he was jealous of Brock Lesnar, a fellow professional wrestler and MMA fighter. He built a fitness center next to his home where people could train together. Lashley was a Denver resident during his fight days. He says that there wasn’t a gym he could call home.
When it became that Lashley couldn’t improve his situation to the point that he felt he needed to to truly excel in fighting, he knew it was time to retire.
“I built an American Top Team in Denver and I was like, maybe I can bring people in,” Lashley said. These are some of the expenses I had to incur and I now run a gym. Now I’m selling my cardio kickboxing class and trying to push my crossfit courses and I was like alright, this is pulling me further away from what I’m trying to accomplish.
“I was like, if I want to do this thing full time, get in the UFC and make a run or stay with Bellator and run for that title, I’ve got to put it all together and it was challenging. I didn’t find a way that I could do it and I didn’t want to take any time away from my kids, so I was kind of in an awkward situation.”
Given that he’d spent time training at various gyms with high-level fighters, Lashley wondered what would have happened if he’d made a permanent move to San Jose to train with the likes of Cain Velasquez and Daniel Cormier at American Kickboxing Academy, or to Florida to work with Dan Lambert’s loaded roster at ATT in Florida. That said, he credits the coaches that he did have with getting him as far as he did.
Lashley last fought in 2016, ending his pro fighting career with a 15-2 record that includes a 5-0 mark inside the Bellator cage. Bellator and Lashley worked well together, as Lashley was permitted to participate in the promotion and pursue bookings for pro wrestling.
This flexibility is not possible in UFC and Lashley pointed out that it was the primary reason why he didn’t make the UFC walk to the Octagon.
“I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I know that Dan had talked with Dana at one time and Dana he was fair with it, he said, ‘You know we can’t offer him a huge contract, but we will give him something that he can get his foot in the door and kind of prove himself,'” Lashley said. “That’s all I knew and then when I talked with Dan about it — Dan’s a huge pro wrestling fan — Dan was like, ‘They want you to sign everything. There’s no more pro wrestling. Are you ready to shut the doors on pro wrestling?’ I was like, ‘Golly.’ You can’t offer me a contract and say, ‘Yeah we bring him in, but he needs to shut all of that down and get small money.’ Because the wrestling is something that I knew that I could really make some good money on long term. So I couldn’t take a small contract to prove myself where I had pro wrestling where I’d already proven myself and that was always my money bag that I could always go back to. It was impossible .”
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“Everything was left up in the air for me with Coker and I wish I could have done that with Dana, but I understand that you can’t do that in the UFC,” Lashley added. He won’t let anyone have that kind of part-time contract, which allows you to do whatever you want. That’s exactly what I wanted and that was what he wouldn’t give .”
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