Carlos Condit – Starting Over

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By Thomas Gerbasi

When Carlos Condit walks into the UFC Octagon for the first time on Wednesday night, he’ll be a little lighter than usual. No, he’s not dropping to the lightweight division for his match against Martin Kampmann, but there won’t be those extra couple of pounds he’s carried since March 24, 2007, the night he won the vacant WEC welterweight title belt.

Right now, that belt is sitting in his home, a symbol of his time atop the organization’s 170-pound division, a weight class eliminated by the WEC earlier this year in favor of divisions from flyweight through lightweight. Now Condit must begin his road to the top again, in the UFC.

“For me, it’s more motivation,” he said. “I feel like I have to climb back up the ladder. I’m not the top dog anymore, so it actually it is a challenge. I felt like I had done pretty much everything there was to do in the WEC at the time, and now there are more challenges for me and it’s definitely more motivating. The UFC welterweight division is one of the toughest, if not the toughest, divisions in the whole sport, and I feel honored to be competing with some of the best guys in the world and I’m excited to make my mark and hopefully make a big splash in the UFC.”

During his five fight run in the WEC, Condit went from talented prospect to one of the top welterweights in the game, finishing fighters like John Alessio, Brock Larson, Carlo Prater, and Hiromitsu Miura in the process. But at the time of the organization’s decision to discontinue the weight class, Condit was at a crossroads in his career. He had just survived a gut check against Miura before finishing the Japanese contender in the fourth round, and was about to face Larson – a fighter he submitted in 2:21 a year and a half earlier – in a rematch. Meanwhile, the rest of the top welterweights in the game were busy beating each other up in the UFC. So his migration to the Octagon couldn’t have come at a better time.

But there were more changes in store for Condit, even before his debut in the UFC was announced. Last November, he left longtime trainer Tom Vaughn and the FIT NHB team in Albuquerque to begin working with the Arizona Combat Sports team. It was a tough decision for the 24-year old New Mexico native, but one he felt was necessary.

“I felt kinda stagnant,” he admits. “If you don’t change things and continue to improve, you’re not going to grow as a fighter. I don’t think that I’ve reached my peak yet, and I want to keep making strides towards my peak.”

And with training partners like WEC and UFC vets Jamie Varner, Ryan Bader, CB Dollaway, Aaron Simpson, and Steve Steinbeiss all in the gym with him, Condit didn’t get any pitty-pat welcome to Arizona.

“It was exciting,” said Condit, who now makes his home in Mesa. “I love to compete and when I started training at Arizona Combat it was a lot more competitive environment. It was like being in a shark tank again. It was thrilling to be with a bunch of guys that really pushed me.”

Condit will need all the pushing he can get, considering that he hasn’t been in action since the Miura fight last August. The eight month break is the longest of his almost seven year pro career, so he’s itching to get back in there and expects that any rust has been knocked off in the gym.

“I would have liked to have stayed a little more busy, but this is the way things turned out,” he said. “It has been in the back of my mind that I haven’t fought in a while, but I’ve been going to war every day I train. Every day I have pretty much the fight of my life with the guys that I’m training with.”

That’s good, especially since daily wars will probably simulate his matchup with Kampmann, the former middleweight contender who recently moved down to welterweight in search of a title shot. In addition to his well-rounded skill set, Kampmann also has an edge in Octagon experience, but that’s something Condit isn’t too concerned about.

“I’ve been in a lot of big fights, I’ve dealt with jitters all throughout my career, and I’m a professional, so I think that I’m gonna go out there and perform to the best of my abilities,” said Condit of making his UFC debut. “I feel less pressure for this fight than I have for some of my previous title defenses, so having the experience of having gone through a lot of this stuff, I don’t think it’s gonna affect me too much.”

And strangely enough, despite his popularity among fight fans, to the casual fan, Carlos Condit may be seen as the new kid on the MMA block on Wednesday night. That’s just fine with the “Natural Born Killer”, who hopes fans will get up to speed on him as soon as the bell rings.

“I’m gonna go out there and fight like I always do,” he said. “I fight to win, I fight to finish, and people find that exciting, so I think they’re gonna walk away saying ‘that kid’s exciting and that kid comes to fight.’ I guarantee that’s what they’ll see on the 1st.”

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