When Keanan Patershuk steps into the cage on Saturday, he’ll be facing off with a young prospect with a love for the mic in Canada’s Hunter Lee. The two square off for the vacant Unified MMA middleweight title in a much anticipated bout. While some might be bothered by the verbal jousting coming the other way, Patershuk’s unconventional route to MMA had him more than perpared for it.
“I was a junior hockey player from the time I was like 14 to 20,” he explained. “Smack talk does not do anything to me. I started playing junior hockey against men when I was 14 years old. So I’m more than used to that and more than used to receiving it.”
It wasn’t a clean transition from hockey to MMA for the Warriorcamp product. In fact, there were a lot more steps on the journey before he even got close to the path that he’s currently on.
“I spent a majority of my twenties with my wife. We were just flipping houses and had a trade and started a family,” he said. “I think it was maybe like the fourth or fifth house I flipped, and my wife asked me if we could go traveling overseas because I did it when I was a kid.”
His wife was down for the idea. So the couple, and their family, packed up everything. They hit the road and embraced the chaos.
“I’d finally finished everything on the house, put it up for sale, sold it, left the dogs with her parents,” Patershuk said. “And we backpacked the South Pacific for the better part of three months with a four and a two year old girls at the time.”
It was on the way home from that trip that the path to MMA made itself clear to him, but it wasn’t his suggestion. In fact, it was something that his wife knew all along.
“We did Hawaii, Fiji and Australia and it was incredible. So much fun, but our whole conversation during that trip coming back, she’s like, ‘what do you want to do’?” he recalled, noting that she had plans to get into real estate. “I just paused. She just stops and looks at me. She’s like, you want to do MMA, don’t you? I didn’t have to say it.”
While she was right, it wasn’t exactly a big secret. Since his hockey days, that urge to compete had been at him. Now it was time to act on it.
“I’d work like a 12 or 16 hour shift and I have to come home and go to the gym for two hours,” Patershuk explained. “I need not only the physical stimulation, but I need to compete badly.”
You can catch his next chance to scratch that competition itch at Unified MMA 67. His title fight against Hunter Lee will take place as the main event with the card beginning at 8pm EST this Saturday.
