“It kind of felt like I was in jail”- Anthony Pettis blames quarantine measures for his horrible performance in PFL 2021 season
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Anthony Pettis
Former UFC lightweight champion, Anthony Pettis said goodbye to the organization after almost a decade of service. He joined PFL, and it was one of the biggest signings in the history of PFL. He was a big favorite to win their 2021 lightweight champion, but things went south, and Pettis was eliminated in the early rounds of the contest.
Pettis had very high hopes from this venture, and he talked about what went wrong in the recent episode of The MMA Hour, he said, “So strategically, I came in there trying to be ‘Showtime’ and do these cartwheel kicks and all these crazy things in the first fight, and it didn’t play in my favor. I almost caught him, but I lost all three rounds pretty much. Then the second fight, I go in there and fight Raush, the world champ, the guy who just won, and I really focused on boxing because the canvas in the PFL was super slippery.”
He added, “I slipped every time I threw a high kick or any type of kick. So I never fought on that type of canvas for a long time. I’ve been fighting on the UFC canvas for my whole career pretty much. So it was a lot of new things that happened.”
“It was nerve-wracking“- Anthony Pettis believes the whole ‘staying away from family’ thing got inside his head
The entire world suffered because of the Coronavirus pandemic, many sports organizations closed their operations, and PFL had to reschedule their 2020 season as well. Pettis was very excited for his debut, but the whole quarantine routine got to him, he added, “All of it got to me. The biggest thing that got to me was the quarantine. We had to go there and stay there 17 days inside this little bubble that they made for us, which was dope.”
Pettis admitted the arrangements were great, but he got homesick, and that affected his performance, “They spent a lot of money on that setup for us, to make sure the tournament could play on. But sitting in that hotel room away from my family, my girl’s about to give birth — there was a lot at play that made me not want to be mentally there in that hotel room. It kind of felt like I was in jail. Bro, if this is how jail feels, I never want to go to jail. I can’t deal with it. So doing both of those quarantines, mentally it gave me time to think about everything. It was nerve-wracking,” Pettis concluded.
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Suryansh Thakur
(1600 Articles Published)