Welcome to the glamorous life of a professional fighter.
For the last month, Jorge Gurgel has made his home In a small room in the Sityodtong gym in Somerville, Massachusetts. When he has to visit the bathroom in the middle of the night, he has to dodge heavy bags on the way. His wake-up call doesn’t come from the front desk of a posh hotel or an alarm clock, but from the buzzer ringing off rounds as his gym mates hit the heavy bags.
Gurgel calls it “that Rocky Balboa feeling,” and living two feet away from the mat at the gym has been a Godsend for the budding lightweight contender, who has finally realized that to achieve his dreams as a fighter, he had to get away from his own gym back in Cincinnati.
“I always knew that I needed to improve,” said Gurgel, a native of Fortaleza, Brazil. “The problem is that I always put everybody else in front of me. At one point in time, something got published saying that I had more UFC fighters than the current popular coaches. I had eight UFC fighters at one point. But I had to finally draw the line and say ‘listen guys, I dedicated the last eight years to build a core of great fighters, so you can roll the ball by yourselves while I’m gone. I need to do this while I can because I don’t want to be the guy who’s 40-something years old who says ‘man, if I had focused on myself, I shoulda, coulda, woulda done this and that.’ So I need to leave now, eight weeks before a fight.’ They all understand and support me, and I understand how important it is, especially for my head, to be free. Here, I’m just a student.”
Before heading to Boston to work with Mark DellaGrotte for his UFC 91 bout this Saturday against Aaron Riley, Gurgel spent his last camp in Seattle with Matt Hume, and the results were immediately evident in his UFC 86 bout against Cole Miller, one which he dominated from the outset and looked more impressive than he had in any of his previous bouts in the Octagon.
But then he got caught in a triangle choke by a resilient Miller and was submitted with 12 seconds left. And what may have made the loss even harder to deal with was that not only did he look to be at his best before the end, but that his entire family had come to Las Vegas to watch him fight.
“My whole family was there, my brothers, their wives, my father, my mother,” said Gurgel. “My step dad told me, ‘Jorge, that is the first time in my life that I’ve seen a fighter win and lose in the same fight.’ That never left my mind.”
“Cole Miller didn’t beat me up,” Gurgel continues. “I made a mistake and lost focus for a split second in the last 30 seconds of the fight and got caught in a submission. That’s the name of the game. More credit to him and I take my hat off to him, but it’s not like he’s the better fighter and I feel like he beat me. I controlled the whole fight and I got in cruise control. I made a mental mistake and it cost me the whole fight. All I heard in the last three months was either ‘tough break’ or ‘s**t happens.’ So you know what I learned? S**t happens.”
Gurgel laughs, and as one of the most positive and happy fighters in the game, it’s odd to then hear him explain how he reacted to the loss.
“The first time I ever got depressed in my life was after that fight,” said Gurgel, now 15-4. “It hit me really hard. I didn’t want to go back to Cincinnati and back to my school. I went straight to Seattle and I’ve pretty much been in training camp ever since that fight, waiting for the UFC to call me back.”
The UFC did call, with an assignment all fight fans should be excited about against the all-action Riley. This one has ‘war’ written all over it.
“I have a lot of respect for Aaron; he’s a very, very tough opponent,” said Gurgel. “He’s fought a lot of fights, he’s a veteran of the sport, has a lot of experience behind him, and he’s the exact opponent that I’ve always wanted – someone who’s gonna meet me in the middle and trade punches. He’s a guy with a great name and great reputation as a tough fighter and that’s exactly what I want, to get a victory over him and put Cole Miller behind me forever.”
And to get ready for what may be 15 minutes of hell, Gurgel made the trip up north to Massachusetts, where he is living a Spartan existence far removed from the comforts of home.
“People think it’s all flowers and sunshine and fame,” he chuckles. “I have a brand new house with no furniture in it that I don’t live in. I have a car I don’t drive. I have a school where I barely go in and teach. Six or seven weeks, four times a year, you live in a little bed in the basement of a gym, eating out of tuna fish cans, making broccoli for yourself and training five to six hours a day, and the time you’re not training you’re icing your little wounds. But that’s the sacrifice you have to make because it gets you ready.”
19 fights, five broken noses, two knee replacements, and an elbow replacement later, Jorge Gurgel has done more than his share of sacrificing. But with schools in six states and in Canada, you would think he really doesn’t need to do this anymore. You would be wrong though.
“I was born to do this,” he said. “I think everyone has calling that lets you know what you’re meant to do in this world. Some people don’t listen to anybody and they follow their dreams, and some people listen to everybody else around them and follow everybody else’s dreams and end up getting a regular job or something that makes them comfortable. I always knew that I was put in this world to compete and test myself and I can’t imagine myself doing anything else but this.”
Tickets for UFC 91: Couture vs Lesnar, are still on sale. To order tickets, click here.
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