Undefeated Hungarian middleweight Norbert Novenyi Jr. ended a lengthy layoff earlier this year, returning to action with a knockout win against Andy Manzolo back in February.
Novenyi (6-0) will enter the cage once again at Bellator 297 this Friday in Chicago, looking to stay active after losing far too much time in his career to date.
“I mean that was my plan. My plan was to get one in February, get one early summer, enjoy the summer, and then one more at the end of the year,” Novenyi told Cageside Press in a recent exclusive interview. “So there’s the plan, and I’m going to get three scalps this year, and it’s going to be a good year.”
Novenyi has lost time to both the coronavirus pandemic, and an ACL injury that required surgery and a lengthy rehab process.
“To be honest with you the worst part was early on, when I don’t know if people just didn’t know what they were talking about, telling me that— Well they did know, because some of them had their ACLs done or whatever, but when I say they didn’t know what they were talking about, they never wanted it enough, never wanted it hard enough, so they just said ‘aww man this is rough, it’s going to be rough,’ this and that. It was painful, I’m not going to lie, but other than that, it’s pain, you just have to get on with it.”
Novenyi’s coach got him back into sparring in roughly four months, which was an upside. The downside, quite obviously, was the time away from actually fighting. “It was more the time, that was what was hard, not the surgery stuff. Obviously my knee’s never going to be the same, and it was painful, but it’s only pain, you can deal with that. To me, it was more that, before I had to take a year, year and a half out because of COVID and stuff like that, and then a year and a half because of the knee.”
When his knee was at its worst and he couldn’t walk properly, Novenyi was still at the gym for two or three sessions a day, even though he wasn’t fighting. Even when he couldn’t train, he would stay busy, seated, and shadow box, or lift weights.
Finally returning to action in February, “it felt great. It felt like I had a lot of frustration inside of me, and by performing, I could release that frustration.” But as the fight approached, Norbert Novenyi Jr. was careful not to get his hopes too high.
“Even after the weigh-ins, I was like, ‘I’m only going to believe I’m fighting, after three years almost, once I’m in that cage. And he’s in there as well.'”
Luckily, noted Novenyi, his opponent ended up showing up, “and that’s all she wrote.”
If there was an upside to his injury, it’s that at least some of it coincided with downtime during the pandemic, where crowds were either sparse, or non-existent. The middleweight fought just once without a crowd present, in fact.
“It didn’t even feel like a fight. I tried to kind of get myself going, obviously I was nervous walking out, but as I was walking out I was like ‘this is a bit, it’s not what I want it to be.’ I was a bit too calm in there and all that stuff. I wasn’t really in the moment. So I think that was one thing I was happy that I didn’t have to do [fight without fans], that I had a crowd again. But other than that, a fight’s a fight, I just want to perform and I want to do what I do. Literally that’s my job, to fight.”
Watch our full interview with Bellator 297’s Norbert Novenyi Jr. above. Novenyi faces Kamil Oniszczuk this Friday in Chicago, IL. For more from Novenyi, his media day scrum is below.
