“It’s not hard to achieve your goals if you actually set your mind to something and focus on it a hundred percent. “It let me know that anything is possible,” he said. And Jones’ eventual success steeled his resolve to make it big in MMA even more. Jones and Sterling would work out together at Ithaca, New York’s Bombsquad Gym, and Sterling got hooked on the sport, taking whatever money he had to spend on food and gas for the trips to the gym. While there, he got in touch with a friend he met at his previous school, Morrisville State College: future UFC light heavyweight champion Jon Jones. Now it was time to get to work, something certainly not foreign to the 24-year-old, who began pursuing his MMA dreams during college at SUNY Cortland, where he picked up All-American honors twice. And that initial opponent would change when Martins got injured, prompting the arrival of another UFC newcomer, Cody Gibson to face him this Saturday at UFC 170 in Las Vegas. After a bit of screaming when he got the news, he immediately said ‘yes’ to the offer and didn’t think about who or when he was fighting until afterward. “I wasn’t expecting to possibly try to get in until the Summertime.” “I thought I had at least one more fight before I got called,” he said. But when he did get the call in late January to replace the injured Bryan Caraway against Lucas Martins, it was a bit of a surprise. Unstoppable thus far, Sterling was a no-brainer pick to eventually become a member of the UFC’s bantamweight roster. It doesn’t matter and he won’t be able to stop you. If you’re that good at it, you’re that good at it. If a guy knows you’re gonna hit a blast double or high crotch, it doesn’t matter. It’s kind of like what we say in wrestling. But if you’re improving and you’re showing that you’re evolving every time you step into that cage, then it doesn’t really make a difference whether they scout you or not. “If you’re not improving as an individual, then that becomes an issue because you’re going to be the same guy and it’s easy to figure you out. It just let me know how much I’ve come along in my game, and it gave me that much more confidence to know that I can go with those guys that are black belts and grapple and strike with the best.”Īs for that YouTube video, he doesn’t care that it’s still up there. Then I ended up falling and I got the better of him on the ground. When we fought I got the better of him in the stand-up. The result? Sterling took less than two minutes to submit Roberts via rear naked choke and move to 8-0 as a pro. So not only does Sterling have to deal with the inevitable doubts that come in your first fight after surgery, but he has to face someone who got the better of him in their grapping session two years prior. He did recover, and after a brutal rehab process, Sterling was cleared to return to active duty for a Novemfight. I talked to a couple people who had similar surgeries and they told me to keep positive, and if there was anybody they knew who could recover from it, it was me.” Otherwise it can really start to bring you down. “But you have to fight those negative doubts and keep them out of your mind. “That crossed my mind a lot actually,” said Sterling. He admits that there were times when he wondered whether he would still be the same fighter he was when he returned. Long Island’s Sterling was just 1-0 as a pro at the time, and he would go on to add six more wins without a loss to his record before a torn labrum that required surgery put him on the shelf for nearly 15 months. “He pretty much got the best of me, but I defended all his submission attempts.” “I really couldn’t do anything against the guy,” Sterling said of grappling with the jiu-jitsu black belt. There’s a YouTube video out there of Aljamain Sterling that a lot of fighters probably would have gone out of their way to get deleted from the video sharing site.įor nearly two and a half minutes in 2011, Sterling was forced to defend submission after submission from Joel Roberts during a Bellator tryout.
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