When Rob McCullough woke up, it wasn’t the roll out of the bed, stretch your legs and prepare for the rest of the day type of wake-up. No, this was quite different.
“At one point, I was out of it and I’m like ‘wait a minute, he’s sitting on my chest and elbowing me in the face,’” laughed McCullough, recalling the sequence when he got buzzed and dropped to the canvas by Donald Cerrone in their epic war last November. It’s not the type of scene you want to wake up to, and most would just opt to cover up and wait for the referee to intervene or roll out of immediate danger into a fight ending submission.
Not McCullough though. He amazingly fought his way free, tucked his chin in and went right back to war with the future title challenger. For three rounds it went on like this, with both men hitting the canvas and taking hellacious shots from each other. When it was over, Cerrone’s hand was raised in victory via unanimous decision, but there were really no losers in this 2008 Fight of The Year candidate.
“That’s the way I felt when I walked out of the cage,” said ‘Razor’ Rob. “He might have won on points, but I was prepared to die on that one.”
It was one of those fights where you don’t necessarily prove anything to the fans, but one where you prove something to yourself. It’s something abstract that you can’t work on the gym – you either have it or you don’t. McCullough has it.
“You can do all the training and look like Chuck Norris in the gym, hitting the bag and doing your thing, but when you get in there and you get hit, and you’re tired and bleeding, it’s a little different,” said the eight year MMA veteran and former WEC lightweight champion. “You’ve really got to dig down and I think it’s something you’ve gotta have. That’s a true test of a fighter, of a warrior. You get in there and it doesn’t end up going your way for a second, it’s fight or flight. So it was good to know ‘hey, I’m prepared to go to war, and I’ll prove it.’”
Oddly enough, the loss to Cerrone did more for McCullough in terms of public acclaim than his previous fight – a three round win over Kenneth Alexander in June of last year – did. In the Alexander bout, McCullough wasn’t his usual ‘guns blazing’ self, leading to whispers that he was gun-shy and tentative following the loss of his belt via TKO to Jamie Varner less than four months earlier, without taking into consideration that Alexander’s style wasn’t exactly conducive to a Pier Six brawl. Regardless, the Cerrone fight took care of such talk.
“I hope so,” said McCullough. “People were saying ‘I hope he’s the old Rob and he comes to fight.’ I didn’t go anywhere.”
And at 31, McCullough is gearing up for another run at the belt, beginning with Sunday’s bout against Marcus Hicks. But the Huntington Beach, California native isn’t hoping that past glories will carry him to victory. He’s taken the loss to Cerrone to heart and has switched things up training wise, opting to travel to Las Vegas to work with Shawn Tompkins.
“I always fought for fun – I did it because I loved to do it, and I always made sure that it was something that I didn’t have to do,” McCullough explains. “I made sure I made money personal training or teaching classes, so it never took the fun out of it for me. But as my paychecks grew, I started going ‘wow, this really is my career.’ And I’m getting older and I know I can’t do this forever, so coming off a loss, even though it was a great fight and got fight of the night, I knew I had to get back on the title track, so I had to change something up. I have great training partners in Huntington Beach, but I was kinda like the big fish in the pond. I needed to go somewhere where I was just an average Joe.”
A heart to heart with longtime manager Ken Pavia produced the name of Tompkins, who McCullough says, “has a great resume with guys at 155, so I said let’s do that. It got to the point where I said that this is something I really love to do. I loved to fight ever since I was a kid, but you’ve always got to be learning. When you think in your mind that you’ve stopped learning and you know it all, that’s when you’re gonna get really hurt. So I backseated everything, humbled myself, and said ‘hey, I’m down to do this.’”
The ensuing training camp has been intense for McCullough, who counts Tyson Griffin, Gray Maynard, John Alessio, and Martin Kampmann among his training partners. And a lot of his sparring has been with unbeaten Evan Dunham, who made quite an impression in his UFC debut last Saturday in London when he knocked out Per Eklund. Now McCullough will be looking to match or surpass his buddy’s output this Sunday in Texas. If he succeeds, it will be the first step back towards his championship belt in a stacked division that is getting more interesting by the day.
“Almost regretfully to say, when I had the belt, I was never looking to get the belt,” he said. “I was doing this because I wanted to have fun, and the belt came. I had it, it was cool, but my training started to slack, I was the big dog on the block, and now that I’m back in the hunt, and it’s definitely added some motivation. People always say to me, ‘who are you fighting next? God, you always have tough fights.’ That’s why I do this. I don’t want to be out there just beating up average Joes and guys with no skill. I want to get in there, go to war, and have fun.”
Want to Leave a Comment?