JRE MMA Show #106 with Leon Edwards

Leon Edwards (0:12)

I'm good, how are you?

Joe Rogan (0:16)

First of all, fun hanging with you last night. It was a good time.

Leon Edwards (0:18)

It's been the first time seeing you live.

I was saying to my manager, you're so effortless, you're talking, right? But it's still funny, if you can approach fighting like that, like make it effortless, then you're doing a good job.

Joe Rogan (0:34)

Well, I think some guys can at certain stages, right? Like there's moments in fights where don't you feel like you're in a zone sometimes, and it just, everything's flowing.

Leon Edwards (0:43)

Saturday night.

Joe Rogan (0:44)

Saturday night, yeah.

Leon Edwards (0:45)

I felt good, all backstage, because leading up to the fight, everyone was like, ring rust, ring rust. So I was kind of waiting for some feeling to say, where's ring rust, right? But I felt great backstage, and I preferred fighting with no crowd.

Joe Rogan (0:59)

Did you really?

Leon Edwards (1:00)

Yeah.

You get to the apex, and it's like, you get there, you wrap your hands, you warm up, you fight. There's no hanging around for five hours backstage, and just, it's like a gym, right? You get there, you're warmed, and you just go compete. So I preferred it for sure.

Joe Rogan (1:16)

Did you prefer it because of there's no noise, no distractions, no nothing?

Leon Edwards (1:21)

And you can hear your coaches clearly. Oh yeah, yeah. Instructions clearly.

I'm a very good listener to my coaches, so I wouldn't say I prefer it, but it was good, I enjoyed it.

Joe Rogan (1:32)

You have been in a very interesting position over the last few years, where you are one of the top UFC welterweights, but just because of bad fortune, things just haven't totally lined up correctly.

Fights have fallen apart, injuries and sicknesses, and a bunch of shit went down, and until Saturday night, you had been kind of ignored by a lot of fans. Like a lot of people don't understand what level you're at. They don't understand. I think they saw it for the brief moment that you fought Saturday night, but then unfortunately, there's the injury. Bilal has the accidental eye poke, and it's another unfortunate situation, but at least during that first round, they got to see your skill level.

Leon Edwards (2:23)

Yeah, for sure. And I was just getting warmed up as well. Over the last year and a half, I've learned so much that I wanted to show and to have that incident happen.

It's one in a million, right? When you're preparing in camp, you're like, I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that. And then when that happened, I was like, I thought it was okay. Take five minutes, let it play out a little bit, then hopefully we can fight again. But he just, he's always that bad-ass.

Joe Rogan (2:50)

And then was it, it was not quite, it wasn't a poke.

Leon Edwards (2:53)

Nah, it wasn't a poke.

Joe Rogan (2:54)

It was like a knuckle.

Leon Edwards (2:55)

If you see the picture, it's like, you're kicking, right? So when you're kicking, you don't hold your fist and kick like this, right? You kind of use it to momentum to swing your arm back. And as I was doing it, he kind of just grazed his eyes. Well, not grazed, he kind of went deep, but he grazed his eyes a bit. And then...

Joe Rogan (3:14)

But was it like the front knuckles?

Leon Edwards (3:17)

It looked like it from the pictures. I couldn't tell. I didn't feel it. I thought it was the kick that got him in his body and then he fell down at the start, you know? The one that started grabbing his eyes, I was like, oh shit, I caught him in his eye.

Joe Rogan (3:29)

Right.

Leon Edwards (3:30)

I thought it was just literally the kick that caught him because I did this and then...

Joe Rogan (3:34)

I think Dana put a photo on his Instagram, Jamie.

Leon Edwards (3:38)

I think it was a knuckle. We weren't this, for sure.

Joe Rogan (3:41)

It's so unfortunate, man. But I mean, for you, what I was getting at was that it has to be so frustrating. Here you are.

Another ad blocker.

Here you are. You have this long layoff. And fights keep getting canceled. And then you finally get a fight. You're performing really well. And then this happens.

Leon Edwards (4:00)

It's like the bad luck, right? The last year or so, just one after the Woodley fight, in March, and had that canceled the week before, on the Sunday before the fight. And then from there, just bad luck, bad luck, bad luck trickling down.