Edmonton — There were plenty of takeaways from Mike Malott’s last-minute loss to Neil Magny at UFC 297 in Toronto earlier this year. Areas he needed to improve in. He’ll look to show those improvements come this Saturday at UFC Edmonton, while admitting that he was surprised by the fallout from his first setback in the company.
“I’ll be honest it was surprising at first. I’d assumed there’d be some negative criticism, but man I was blown away by how many people were I guess waiting for me to fall,” Malott (10-2-1) admitted during Wednesday UFC Edmonton media day, speaking with outlets including Cageside Press. “But also on the opposite side too — we could focus on that all day, there’s a ton of negativity you can focus on, but there was also a ton of positivity. A ton of people messaged me and were like ‘look man you obviously showed some great stuff in that fight, you were winning the majority of the fight.'”
“It’s not like I got steamrolled for 15 minutes and we have to rethink my entire game. Again, I think I win that fight most times. We run that fight back however many times, I think I win the vast majority of those fights.”
That said, Malott has admitted that there were adjustments to be made. “I feel like you do the same thing after a win too, see what you can improve on,” he explained. “But it’s how much do you want to dive into that? You can write it off to being like, well I won 14 minutes of that fight and just made a couple of bad decisions at the end, a couple things went wrong, so if I just don’t do those then I’ll be fine next time and I beat that guy nine times out of ten.”
“Or we can do what we did,” Malott continued, “where it’s like, look it’s probably the symptom of a much larger problem that we didn’t recognize as much. How do we dive into that and figure out where we can get the most growth? And that’s what we did. The last nine, ten months have been just focused on improvement and growth and getting back in here to be the most confident version of myself and the most prepared for the fight that I can possibly be.”
Mike Malott was supposed to return to action over the summer. The Canadian welterweight, now one of the faces of the sport at home, was booked into a fight with Gilbert Urbina. It quickly went off the rails. First Urbina withdrew from the fight. Malott then announced that he too was injured. Now, he comes back to face Trevin Giles instead.
Despite having prepared for Urbina, however, it’s not a fight he’s really looking to get back on the books. “Gilbert Urbina is a solid fighter, I thought it was a good stylistic match-up and I think I would have had a great performance against him,” Malott told Cageside Press. “I think I’m going to have a great performance against Giles. To be honest for me, it’s never really been about who’s across the cage from me.”
While Malott admits that he and his coaches do study opponents, “this is really just about my journey,” he added. “I think about it a little bit in a selfish way I guess, but that’s how I think I’m going to get the most out of myself.”
The silver lining is that he gets to fight at home in Canada for a third time. He’s 1-1 in the country under the UFC banner, following fights in Vancouver and Toronto.
“Obviously it would have been nice to have fought in July, the fight I prepared for but I would much rather pull out of a fight in Denver than in Edmonton. I’m excited to get back in front of those Canadian fans.”
Following last weekend’s UFC 308 and Shara Bullet’s stunning double-spinning back fist finish of Armen Petrosyan, Malott joked about having to start training the move in the gym. Asked whether he had any fun moves he’d yet to hit in a fight, Malott replied by saying that “there’s a ton of fun moves that I like to do that I haven’t hit in fights. Hopefully I pull out a couple of them this time.”
He’s not letting slip what they might be, however. “Hell no bro!”
Watch the full UFC Edmonton media day appearance by Mike Malott above.
