UFC president Dana White could only wince in sympathy when Jalin Turner’s name got brought up in the post-fight news conference. That moment he’d had in the first round against Renato Moicano at UFC 300, the one where he dropped Moicano with a clean punch and then turned to walk off rather than following up for a quick finish? It didn’t exactly pan out, seeing as how Moicano recovered and then came back to beat Turner in the second round.
“He’s going to regret that one for the next few weeks,” White said. “Beautiful shot, should have jumped on him and finished him. Yeah, I feel sorry for the kid.”
Talk to fighters about this kind of thing, and you might find out that the next few weeks is only the beginning. For some fighters, those regrets can live on in their memories for years.
Brian Stann retired over a decade ago and sometimes he still thinks about his decision to throw an inside leg kick at Chael Sonnen, an opponent he knew was looking for just such an opportunity to take him down and beat him on the mat. That fight was in 2011. Stann later became a UFC commentator, then left the job to get his MBA, eventually becoming a high-level executive at multiple real estate companies. To this day his mind still sometimes returns to that inside leg kick, just that one isolated moment of poor decision-making.
“Those are the ones that bother you,” Stann said. “You know, like a year before that I fought Phil Davis. I can say now that, matchup-wise and athleticism-wise, I know I’m not beating him on my best day. But I had a good training camp for that fight and I gave him everything I had that night, so that one doesn’t bother me. But the one against Chael, you make really dumb mistakes like throwing an inside leg kick in the second round that he easily catches and converts on, what the hell are you thinking? That’s stupid. You worked so hard to get to that point and that moment. Those things will recycle through your head a little bit.”
For Jim Miller, the longtime UFC vet who recently became the only person to fight at every UFC centennial event, the one that still bugs him was a fight against Diego Sanchez in 2016.
“I had him up against the cage and I had been working this choke, squeezing it a certain way,” Miller said. “The way he defended it, he put himself into another choke, but I just didn’t see it at the time.”
The thing is, in the grand scope of Miller’s prolific career this wasn’t such a consequential fight. Winning the fights is always better than losing them, but it’s not like a victory over Sanchez at UFC 196 would have propelled Miller to a title shot. It probably would not have changed the overall arc of his career at all.
One of the major differences between fight sports and other pro sports is that you get far fewer overall opportunities to compete. Three UFC fights in one year is a solid output. Four fights in a year is a packed schedule. The number of fighters who’ve ever squeezed in more than that in one calendar year, well, you could count them on two hands.
Meanwhile, a guy in the NFL who only plays in five games a season is typically considered a non-factor. And a baseball player who appears in five games all year? He’s not even a footnote.
The other thing about fighting is that everything is happening so fast, one big blur of action and adrenaline, and then it’s over. Fighters don’t get to return to the locker room and talk it over halfway through. They get, at most, a few 60-second breaks between rounds. It’s just long enough to breathe, get a drink of water and maybe absorb one or two coaching tips before the battle resumes.
Even those brief respites aren’t guaranteed.
Making a mistake can often feel more like an instinctive reaction rather than a conscious decision, sometimes lasting only a few minutes or seconds. This leaves ample time for reflection before the next blunder.
The pain of regret intensifies when the mistake results in significant consequences. Athletes like Chad Mendes, Shane Carwin, and Chris Weidman have all experienced the agony of dwelling on their errors. Mendes’ tension in bed after losing a wrestling championship match, Carwin’s visible disappointment after a UFC title fight loss, and Weidman’s regret over a misguided move in a UFC middleweight championship bout all demonstrate the lasting impact of mistakes in sports.
Weidman, in particular, struggled with the aftermath of his errors, such as a spinning back kick that cost him his title. Despite his setbacks, he realized the futility of dwelling on past mistakes in a sport as unpredictable as fighting. He learned to accept the outcomes, find lessons in defeat, and move forward without succumbing to regret.
While it’s natural for the weight of past mistakes to resurface from time to time, acknowledging them and then pushing them aside is a crucial part of the process. As humans, we must learn to confront our errors, learn from them, and continue our journey without being weighed down by regrets. The sentence needs to be provided in order to be rewritten.