Charlotte, NC — This weekend’s UFC on ABC 4 card in Charlotte, North Carolina sees the return of Irish welterweight prospect Ian Garry.
Garry (11-0) has been looked at as the next coming of Conor McGregor, for obvious reasons. He’s started his career hot, won a Cage Warriors title on the way up, and even riffed on McGregor’s “we’re not here to take part, we’re here to take over” line.
Sound familiar? Then there’s Garry’s knack for spouting memorable, quotable lines in interviews, which was in full display on Wednesday, as “The Future” spoke to media outlets including Cageside Press ahead of his UFC Charlotte fight with Daniel Rodriguez.
“I got what I wanted. I asked for the fight, I made it happen, and here we are,” Garry said about the match-up. “You see the smile on my face? Yeah you know what’s coming.”
What’s coming, Garry went on to explain, is that for “D-Rod” at least, “it’s going to be f*cking bad. I believe I’m far too fast, far too technical, and have far more tools in my bag than he does. He’s got a decent jab that lands quite well, but he overreaches on his left hand a lot.”
“He’s getting older, he’s not as powerful, he hasn’t got that same pop as he used to have, his last three fights. He’s been talking about ‘he’s not felt power like mine.’ How’d that power do in your last three fights, when you went to decision twice then lost by submission? Clearly everyone’s been able to deal with that power, and this is the fall of Daniel Rodriguez. When you lose the way you’re going to lose to me, you don’t come back from that. I’m going to piece him up in every which way and make him hate that he was there.”
Whether it is truly the fall of Daniel Rodriguez remains to be seen, but there’s some notion that the older, more experienced Rodriguez might be overlooking Ian Garry.
When asked about exactly that, however, Garry said he simply doesn’t care. “I don’t think about what he’s doing. All I know is that I’m absolutely going to f*cking smoke him, and there’s nothing that he can do about it.”
Garry, known for some time now as “The Future,” doesn’t seem to care much about his critics in general. “I’m just going to prove me right. I don’t care what anybody else says, I don’t care what your opinion is, whether you love me, whether you hate me,” Garry exclaimed on Wednesday. “I couldn’t give a fiddler’s f*ck. As long as I step in that octagon and I beat whoever is stood across from me, that’s my only job. That’s it.”
When it comes to the fight itself, Garry has both a preference, and prediction, on how it ends.
“In all honesty? A late second, late third round finish. Because if it’s a quick knockout, then you have ‘aww well I just got caught,’ Garry noted. “Whereas if I’m beating you for fourteen minutes and I knock you out in the fourteenth minute, it’s like, what did you for the other fourteen minutes when I whupped your ass? It’s like, I gave you a chance.”
That having been said, Garry doesn’t expect Rodriguez to last that long.
“I don’t believe that Danny lasts more than eight, nine minutes. I think I’m going to get him out of there by the end of the second round. And I believe that is just based on cardio and speed. I am just going to have too much to offer, and I’m going to be too quick for him, and he’s going to just get lost and fumble in the speed. He’s going to start to make errors, overreach, make wrong steps, because he’s going to get desperate, and when he gets desperate, I’m going to take advantage of that.”
Watch the full UFC Charlotte media day appearance by Ian Garry above.
