Pat Healy, on “Beatdown,” discussing the losses on his record and its effect on fans’ perception of him:
“My record’s not the best. I had a lot of fights early in my career that I shouldn’t have took and I took on short notice, but you’ve got to understand, I was poor. Literally poor for five or six years of my life. I don’t think many people can relate to that. They don’t know what that feels like, to not be able to afford to eat good, to be struggling to put food on the table. I don’t think people know what that’s like. I don’t see people relating to that. That’s the reality of my situation. … In a perfect world, I wish I could go back when I was younger and be like, ‘Hey man, this is going to affect you the rest of your life. Maybe you shouldn’t take this fight on two weeks’ notice when you haven’t really been training.’ But I didn’t have any guidance. I just had a dude who, you could call him my manager, I guess, at the time. He would just throw me any fight that came to him. I was always stepping up on short notice. I really love to fight and to be in there, but you see guys nowadays being a lot smarter. They win four or five fights and they’re in a big show or they’ve got great buzz about them. It really pays to do it intelligently.”
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