After a long layoff due to injury Bellator lightweight Mike Hamel came back in style with a head kick knockout victory over Nick Browne at Bellator 293 on Friday night.
“A head kick knockout is always what you kind of wish for, right? You never know what’s going to happen. I was honestly thinking that I was going to go into 15 minutes of hell with that guy,” Hamel told reporters including Cageside Press at his post-fight scrum.
“Nick’s tough. I don’t even know if he’s ever been finished.”
It was a welcome result for Hamel who returned after a long layoff due to shoulder surgery.
“The last time I was in the Bellator cage I had a blowout shoulder. I had to fight opposite stance. That was the worst Mike Hamel 15 months ago,” he said.
“I went through a shoulder surgery, I had a fight fall through, so I wasn’t going to be denied tonight.”
When the sport you love is put on the back burner because of injury, lack of opponents, or other circumstances the return becomes that much sweeter. Hamel spoke on that.
“Nothing feels better than this. This sport, like I said before in other interviews, it beats your ass. It beats you down. It’s one of the hardest things you can put yourself through by choice. To get the results that I feel like I deserve and I earned nothing’s better than that,” Hamel said.
Now that he’s back and finished his fight in the first round, barring any undisclosed injury or circumstance, it seems as though Hamel is ready to return pretty soon.
“Anybody in that top 10 is really good, and honestly people right outside of it, are really good. I honestly don’t care. I want to keep building myself up,” he said.
“For being 30-years-old I’m still pretty young in this sport. I’ve got 15 fights, but I’m just getting exponentially better so whoever they want to feed me…(I was) once just a wrestler now I’m head-kicking people. Watch out.”
Watch the entire post-fight scrum with Mike Hamel above.
