UFC legend Matt Brown has suggested that the back-to-back knockout losses experienced by Alexander Volkanovski may be more of a mental issue than physical, and that the time off between fights may not be the main culprit behind his defeats.
Alexander Volkanovski’s career took a hit recently. He suffered knockout losses in consecutive fights against Islam Makhachev and Ilia Topuria. This was a new experience for him, having not been knocked out since the early days of his career.
The first knockout was a result of a head kick. This happened when Volkanovski took on Makhachev at short notice last October. Fast forward four months, and he faced a similar fate. Topuria landed a barrage of punches that led to a second-round knockout. This defeat cost Volkanovski his UFC featherweight title.
Following these losses, questions have been raised. Did Volkanovski return too soon after his first knockout loss? Could this have contributed to his second consecutive defeat? UFC legend Matt Brown believes it’s not that simple. He argues there’s no definitive way to blame the time off between fights as the primary cause of Volkanovski’s knockout losses.
Brown’s opinion? It’s all very individual and specific to each person. He shared his views on The Fighter vs. The Writer. He doesn’t think you can make a broad statement saying that is the problem. It’s more mental than physical, in his opinion. He’s had concussions before and been knocked out once.
His experience? When he got knocked out, he bounced back and was fine. But when he got concussed in a fight, even though he didn’t get knocked out, he had serious problems for weeks, maybe even months after. Vertigo, falling over, slurred speech. He’d be speaking and just stop, not knowing what he was talking about. Crazy things like that.
Brown has only suffered one real knockout during his career. It was a 2016 loss to Donald Cerrone when he was hit with a head kick in the third round. He revealed that his concussion actually came during a fight with ex-UFC welterweight champion Johny Hendricks. In a 2015 fight where he was largely just out-wrestled for three rounds.
During one of the takedowns, Brown’s head hit the canvas. This left him dazed and confused in the fight. Afterward, he was diagnosed with a concussion. This freak occurrence led to far more physical problems than anything he faced from the knockout in his Cerrone fight.
Brown got knocked out once by ‘Cowboy’ [Donald Cerrone], and he came back with no problem. But mentally, it was harder to come back from the knockout. He doesn’t think you can necessarily make a broad statement about Volkanovski’s situation. If Volkanovski was mentally okay with it, then it probably didn’t play a role. Getting knocked out in front of millions of people, having all these expectations in your head and then getting knocked out, can play a mental role in your training. It might make you question yourself a bit, maybe you’re a little bit safer.
When Brown got concussed, coming back from that wasn’t that hard. He had to do the recovery. It was hard dealing with the fact that he got concussed and there’s a strong possibility that he hasn’t been the same since. Just because we believe that we’re recovered, there’s a chance that there are underlying effects that are causing problems, potentially for the rest of your life that you don’t even know about.
Despite all the science available on concussions, there are still a lot of unknowns related to brain trauma. There’s no exact right or wrong way to recover from it. Brown says in his case, he worked with doctors near his home in Ohio and they recommended one kind of treatment. Then he was offered a completely different alternative when dealing with a separate group of physicians in Colorado.
When he finally started feeling like himself again, Brown had no issues getting back in the gym and preparing for another fight. But he faced a different kind of struggle after his knockout loss. When he got concussed, he was able to come back from that mentally easily. When he got knocked out, that was a mental hurdle to come back from. He had never been knocked out before and Cowboy’s ass happened to f****** knock him out in a really brutal, vicious manner.
He sees that highlight every now and then and he’s like, it looks f****** bad. That mental hurdle, that’s maybe a small little thing that’s a part of it. As for Volkanovski’s future, he’s once again facing calls for an extended break before his next bout. But Brown knows that just sitting out for six months or even a year won’t necessarily solve the problem.
Physically, Volkanovski may get cleared much sooner. But Brown can’t say how long it may take him to move past the turmoil in his own head after suffering two knockouts in a row. Brown knows from his own personal experience what he did to get past the knockout loss. But it’s not a one-size-fits-all cure for anybody in the same situation.
Brown’s personal way of getting over it? He started looking at fighting a bit differently. Each performance was, that’s all that f****** matters. And the way he looks at it himself now, he’s a martial artist for life and he’s going to be on the mats until the day that he dies. This is what he does. The fight itself is a test of his martial arts on that day.
He started looking at it afterward, if he fought him 10 minutes before that, an hour before that, the day before, whatever, maybe he would have knocked him out. All the fight is, a picture in time, whereas he’s a martial artist for life. This is just a picture in time where his martial art was that day. Sort of what Bruce Lee used to talk about, there’s no defeat until you accept defeat. It’s just a moment in time.
There’s no telling how long it will take for Volkanovski to get mentally and physically ready to fight again. That’s why Brown won’t try to advise him to take a certain amount of time off. There’s just no way to know for certain what will work for Volkanovski.
To give advice to someone else, Brown believes you need to know their own personal journey. You need to understand the way their mind works and what makes them tick. Why are they doing this to start with? What’s their motivation? What’s their goal? For some people, that goal is money — like Floyd Mayweather, his goal was money and he did it. For Conor [McGregor], it was probably money.
For others like Jim Miller, Brown thinks he’s a martial artist. He’s not in there specifically for money. The point is there’s a lot of different personalities and you’ve got to understand who they are, what makes them tick, and things like that.
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