“Does the camera add ten pounds, or am I just a little heavier?” Donald Cerrone quipped to open his scrum at the UFC 249 “virtual” media day. The sport’s beloved Cowboy bemoaned “truck stop eating” on the way to Florida, but not to worry — his short notice fight against Anthony Pettis comes at welterweight.
The weight cut, as a result, should not be an issue. Nor should the timing. Fighting on short notice means he “won’t have any time to get scared or get in my own head,” Cerrone (36-14, 1NC) would add. There’s been no long wait ahead of this bout. Just hopping in the RV and driving on over to sunny Florida.
The question before Cowboy Cerrone, to that point, had been about his last fight. The infamous 40 second loss to Conor McGregor at UFC 246. A fight Cowboy admits he didn’t have the fire for.
This time out, “I feel good. Training went well.” But last time? “They talk about people’s fires coming and going. ‘You’ve got to rekindle it, re-fire-it-up. Get re-pumped.’ I don’t know why I didn’t have it last time, on the biggest card, the biggest everything. It sucked. A real kick in the d*ck.”
Cerrone would later tell Cageside Press “it’s not that I didn’t know I didn’t want to be there. It’s just like, I didn’t feel prepared. A little spot in the back of my head, the ‘if bys’ and ‘did yous’ and ‘shouldas’ were weighing heavy on me.”
“I should have put a lot more effort in,” was the veteran’s assessment. “I’m not sitting here making excuses, I’m just saying the wrong guy definitely showed up. And I paid heavily for it, man. What a f*cking embarrassment, I made it 40 seconds.”
It’s clear, months later, that said embarrassment is still a disappointment for one of the UFC’s most beloved fighters. While Cerrone will never let that one performance define him, fans — many less than knowledgeable about the sport — have piled on.
“I half-heartedly just wish I went out there and took a little nap. Went to sleep,” Cerrone said. “Not just embarrassed. But what are you going to do? You’ve got to dust off, get back on the saddle, and do it again. That’s who I am, that’s what I preach. So here I am. Two week’s notice, drove to Jacksonville, going to kick some ass, fight again on Wednesday, fight again on Saturday, then I’ll have enough money to buy a private jet and fly my ass home. So how about that?”
One thing the drive to Jacksonville lacked was his famed grandmother. Not for lack of effort on her part. “She tried,” Cowboy admitted. She even offered to make the drive in the RV with him. Dana White, however, informed Cerrone that he would “not be responsible for grandma getting sick.”
“This is the first fight she hasn’t come to, kind of crazy, in a while,” said Cerrone. She’ll still be watching from home, of course. And fear not: “She says she’s too tough for this bullsh*t-ass corona.”
Cowboy Cerrone returns to action this Saturday, May 9 at UFC 249 in Jacksonville, Florida. The rematch of their 2013 meeting, which Pettis won, tops the televised preliminary card on ESPN (TSN in Canada).
