Top ranked welterweight Rory MacDonald is getting ready to challenge reigning Bellator welterweight champion Douglas Lima on January 25th but he’s already got his eyes set on another prize.
Just a few weeks ago Bellator announced they will be doing a heavyweight grand prix tournament to crown a new heavyweight champion. The tournament is filled with a lot of familiar names, many of which have fought the best heavyweights in the world for years, while others have no heavyweight resume whatsoever.
Names announced for the Bellator Grand Prix include Rampage Jackson, Chael Sonnen, Fedor Emelianenko, Frank Mir, Roy Nelson and Matt Mitrione,
It now appears that Rory MacDonald has also officially requested to be part of the tournament. Here’s what he had to say.
“Yea, I spoke to scott coker about it.” MacDonald said during a Facebook live chat. “He said ‘we’ll see how this fight goes against Lima’ and maybe they can use me as an alternate if something comes up.”
MacDonald has never even fought at middleweight let alone heavyweight. When asked if he’d ever been in there with anyone this big, MacDonald didn’t sound like he had very much experience but was still willing to take the risk.
“Uh, not really but I’m willing to try and fight them” he continued. “It will probably be a bit of a problem but I’m up for the challenge.”
Rory wants to experience what many of the old school fighters had to go through by fighting without any weight restrictions.
“Id like to have that old school experience where like there wasn’t weight classes and you’ve seen smaller guys fight bigger guys and I know
a lot has changed in those years. A lot more skill has come, a lot more athletic guys, so it’s a totally different ballgame. But I’d like to
bring some of that genre back to the modern day and see how it goes.”
