Athletes
Chris Curtis To Fight Until The Bitter End
He's Not A Point Fighter. He Comes To Scrap. "The Action Man" Is Ready To Rock Vancouver.
Spoiler alert…there are no moral victories in the world of Chris Curtis. So don’t expect him to look at the bright side of things after a close decision loss to Kelvin Gastelum in April, even if the pair each picked up a Fight of the Night bonus for their efforts.
“No, losses just suck,” said Curtis. “There’s no such thing as a moral victory for me. And if people take moral victories from fighting, I don't think you really care about the fighting that much. No, there's victory and there's losing.”
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What about the “win or learn” adage?
“You win or you lose,” he said. “You can lose and learn, but you still lost. Yeah. I hate when people are okay with losing. It's absolutely insane to me. If you're okay with losing, what the f**k are you doing this for?”
The angst in Curtis’ voice is evident, and without even asking him, you know that he thinks more about his two UFC losses to Gastelum and Jack Hermansson than he does his four Octagon wins over Phil Hawes, Brendan Allen, Rodolfo Vieira and Joaquin Buckley. That’s unfortunate, because that quartet of victories put him in the middleweight Top 15, and he can likely improve his place there should he beat Nassourdine Imavov this Saturday in Vancouver. But no, those losses don’t leave his mind.
“I never shake 'em off,” he said. “I've never shaken off a loss. You carry every loss with you if you care about it. You just find different ways to kind of exist with it, but I don't think it's ever anything I really shake off. You try to focus on the good, but you always focus on things that went wrong. And if you do everything right, sometimes it still goes wrong. And you always carry that. So I wish I was able to shake it off. Those people live in a world that I envy.”
Well, having Chris Curtis in here does make the MMA world better, whether he believes it or not, and if not for some twists of fate, he might have been making his living with the big gloves as a boxer.
Reasons To Watch UFC 289: Nunes vs Aldana
“Boxing's my first love,” he said. “I follow boxing more than I do MMA, still. It's my favorite sport and the thing that really got me heavy into combat sports. I love the science of it, and it’s something that's just beautiful to me.”
But when his first coach, who happened to be an ex-boxer, found them an MMA gym that they could work out at, Curtis began to move in a new direction that he follows to this day.
Chris Curtis Fight Week Interview | UFC 289
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Chris Curtis Fight Week Interview | UFC 289
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“I was like, ‘Screw it, I'll do this,’ and I just kind of pursued that path. Turns out I was actually pretty good at it, so I just kept doing it. And then I got introduced to other gyms, other fighters, and that was the community I fell into after high school, when I had my own money and my own time.”
UFC 289 PREVIEWS: Main Event | Co-Main Event
Turning pro in 2009, Curtis went through a well-documented rollercoaster of ups and downs before landing in the Octagon in 2021. By then, he was a seasoned veteran of over 30 fights, and that experience showed as he halted Phil Hawes in the first round. And now that he was here, he wasn’t going anywhere, and as subsequent fights have shown, boxing remains his first love on fight night.
Highlight: Chris Curtis Secures Second TKO In A Month | UFC Fight Night: Font vs Aldo
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Highlight: Chris Curtis Secures Second TKO In A Month | UFC Fight Night: Font vs Aldo
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“The only bad thing is that in MMA, a lot of judges and fans, especially, don't understand certain subtleties that come from boxing,” he said. “That kind of works against me. People who box understand the things I do and understand it better and it makes more sense. But to judges and MMA fans, they're like, ‘Oh, why would you do this, this, or this?’ So there are subtleties that are lost, but I think that's what any sport has, and high level things are going to be lost in a sport where we're more of an amalgamation. So I’ve just got to accept it.”
UFC 289 Embedded: All Episodes
What Curtis won’t accept is opponents that won’t show up ready to get into a scrap. His opinions on that topic tore through the internet after his bout with Hermansson, and while he didn’t get the nod against Gastelum, at least he was in the kind of fight he wanted. He expects more of the same in Vancouver against Imavov.
“That's the statement that I think was set and I wanted it to be set,” said Curtis. “I came to fight with Buckley, I came to fight with Gastelum. I still say Gastelum’s the one guy in that building I beat that night. I lost to the judges, I lost to the ref. But Gastelum's the one guy in that f**king building I beat. But even then, I came to fight. I want you to understand that you can be great, you can be good, you can be better than me, just know that when we get in there, I am here to fight you. I'm not looking to win on points, I'm not looking to dance around, I'm not looking to be pretty. I want to dig my trench, I want you to dig your trench and then we'll fight until the last man. We'll use every bomb, every shell, every whatever. But I am here to fight until the bitter end.”
UFC 289: Nunes vs Aldana took place live from the Rogers Arena in Vancouver, Canada on June 10, 2023. See the Final Results, Official Scorecards and Who Won Bonuses - and relive the action on UFC Fight Pass!
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