After a stint of medical clearance and licensing issues, former UFC light heavyweight champion “Sugar” Rashad Evans has finally been cleared to fight. Making his middleweight debut at March’s UFC 209, Evans has not fought inside the octagon since his loss to Glover Teixeira in April of last year. Noone seems more elated about the incipient return of the former champion than “Sugar” Rashad Evans himself.
In an interview with Fox Sports, the former champion explained what it was like being pulled from both UFC 205 and 206 because of an MRI anomaly.
“I never felt so much at the mercy of the other people in my whole life and it’s a very humbling thing. I trained so hard and I put the work in and I did everything I could do on my end but then I had to sit back and be told that I can’t fight. Then I was told that I may never fight again. It was hard to deal with. For the last 14 years or so, I’ve been a fighter for so long I kind of forgot what it’s like to not have this as my biggest form of expression of who I am.”
Evans told Fox Sports:
“For a brief second I was like it may be over and I was in denial for a long time. Even when they told me I couldn’t fight in New York, I was waiting for them to be like ‘oh we’re just kidding’. I couldn’t believe that it was actually going down that I was not going to fight. That it was not clearing up. I was in denial for a while. Then I got the chance to fight in Toronto and then it happened in Toronto where they didn’t even give me a second look. They were like ‘New York said no so we’re saying no’. It was a helpless feeling.”
With this odd tribulation aside, Evans is now licensed and cleared to fight at UFC 209. When the former champion heard the news, he was elated.
“I almost cried to be honest. It was an emotional thing for me because no fighter wants to go out like that, especially me,” Evans told Fox Sports. “I didn’t want to go out like that. I know one day this will be over and I feel like I’ll be able to handle it but I just wasn’t ready for it to end like that. I wasn’t ready for it to end without me having a chance to compete again and have the feelings of how you feel going into a fight.
“You’re battling yourself and you’re nervous and you have all those thoughts in your mind, all those things that happen when you’re riding that emotional roller coaster when you’re getting ready for a fight. Those are the things that you love most about fighting. To never experience that again, it was really hard to wrap my mind around. When the commission said I was able to fight, I was just relieved and I was happy.”
UFC 209 will take place this weekend with a title fight rematch main event between welterweight champion Tyron Woodley and No. 1 contender Stephen Thompson.
