Bellator 274’s Brennan Ward: “Nobody Can Walk Through Me. You Can’t.”

By
Eddie Law
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Uncasville, CT – The road to redemption is a long one for anybody coming off of some serious life issues, but for Bellator middleweight Brennan Ward it felt longer than most.

Speaking to the media following his TKO win over Brandon Bell at Bellator 274, Ward described what kept him out of the Bellator cage since August 2017.

“Let me put it this way, I wasn’t doing the right things even as far back as 2015. I wasn’t living a clean life, I wasn’t training like I’m supposed to train, I was doing drugs, was drinking. 2016, 2017 my drugs use got real bad. My training really suffered I barely trained the last year in 2017 I barely trained at all. When I quit, “retired”, I call it quit because I didn’t have no f*cking money saved at that point. All I was doing was buying motorcycles and drugs and f*cking trucks so I quit. Almost instantly I regretted it about six months later. Most people would kill, there’s so many young guys that would kill to be where I was at, and here I am just partying it away. So instantly I was like, ‘Fuck I’ve got to get back somehow’ but I was already down that rabbit hole,” Ward told the media during his post-fight scrum.

“So I wanted to prove to myself and I wanted to prove to the world dude that you can come back from that sh*t. I thought there was no coming back. When I was at my worst dude I was like 162 pounds soaking wet, f*cking maybe 165, as strung out as strung out can get. If you said in a year-and-a-half from now I’d be fighting on a main card back home in Bellator I’d be like, ‘I would love that, but how? F*cking how?”.

Following his win Ward began to call out fighters in the top 10 at 170 and 185 pounds.

“Yeah I’ve got to get a top 10 guy. I was always in the mix even when I was real active in the early 2010s. That’s when I was really relevant. I’m getting older now I f*cking hate to say it but you know 2013, 2014, 2015, years ago, I was always in the mix. Even when I really wasn’t training towards the end. I didn’t even have my coaching staff the last f*cking year. I pushed everyone away, but I was in the mix even when I wasn’t living right when I wasn’t training. And now that I’m really training I’m really serious man, I’ll be back in the mix.”

“Nobody can walk through me. Nobody in the top 10 at 185 or 170 can walk through me I know they can’t. They couldn’t sit here and tell you ‘I’ll f*ck Brennnan Ward up.’ You ain’t. You can’t. You can’t.”

Watch the full Bellator 274 post-fight press conference with Brennan Ward above. More coverage from the event can be found below.