Aside from Monday’s being Monday, Brandon Royval had good reason not to want to go to work to start this week. On Saturday at UFC Vegas, he won his octagon debut against a former title challenger in Tim Elliott.
Yet despite a second round submission via arm triangle choke, Royval (11-4) was visibly upset post fight, saying his showing wasn’t good enough. Unhappy that he’d have to go back to work come Monday.
Plenty of fighters work to train, especially starting out. A few — Stipe Miocic comes to mind — stick with their jobs despite reaching the highest levels of the sport. Speaking to Cageside Press following UFC Vegas, however, Royval shed some light into just why he wasn’t thrilled with the prospect of clocking in Monday.
“I work overnight to train full time. So I work overnights,” the flyweight fighter explained. “And then I go out and I have a two hour session in the morning. I get like four hours of sleep, if I have strength and conditioning that night, I get four hours of sleep in the day. And I go right back to training at five.”
“I get off work at 8:30 go to the gym at 9AM. Get out of there at 12. And then if I don’t have strength and conditioning, then I get to go home and go to bed. And then I go back to the gym at five,” he continued, detailing the rather tight schedule he lives by. “It’s just like a 30 minute drive home. Then I go sleep for maybe three, four hours and then I go right back to the gym and then I get ready for the day again. But if I have strength and conditioning, I have strength and conditioning from 1 to 2, and then I go sleep for an hour and a half, two hours and then I go do it all over again. My life sucks, bro. No, I’m just kidding.”
While he joked at the end, it’s clear Royval felt his performance wasn’t good enough to get him away from his day job. Fortunes changed, however, when the UFC announced the UFC Vegas bonus winners. Royval vs. Elliott earned Fight of the Night.
As to what was going through his head during his debut, Royval broke things down for us. “In my head I kind of thought he would probably shoot right off the bat, but I thought we’d probably exchange a little bit. Me getting taken down four seconds into the fight is not how I pictured my debut going,” he admitted. “Right when I got hit the mouth, I’m like ‘shoot, is this how this is gonna go?'”
“So that was going through my head right off the bat. I just want to go out here make some good money. I want to go out here and change my life a little bit,” Royval added. He also took issue with the pace, though from an outsider’s perspective, it was a fast-paced fight.
“I’m glad you said that man,” Royval told us. “Because they’re telling me like, that was a good pace. But I felt so slow out there. And I felt like I wasn’t scrambling when I should scramble and all that stuff. You know, I’m happy with the win, but I’m not satisfied.”
The extra $50,000 he earned off the Fight of the Night bonus will hopefully alleviate that just a little.
