Gilbert Burns is still ranked as one of UFC’s top welterweights and faces Sean Brady in Saturday’s main event, but he’s also smart enough to know that fighting can’t last forever.
After celebrating his 38th birthday in July, the one-time UFC title challenger acknowledged that the sand in his hourglass is eventually going to run out, which is why he’s putting his full focus on earning another shot at gold before it’s all over. Taking a page out of his teammate Michael Chandler’s playbook, Burns wants to make his impact felt over his next few fights before calling it a career.
“I’m not getting younger,” Burns told MMA Fighting. “I just turned 38. I feel great. Especially training with all these monsters at Kill Cliff FC, I feel great. I’ve got to test myself everyday with those younger, hungry guys. But the window is closing. It’s not open anymore.
“I believe I’m not here for a long time, I’m here for a good time. Saturday, Sept. 7, is going to be a good fight. I’m excited for that.”
Burns isn’t putting a number on the amount of fights he has left before retirement, and he’s not saying that he wants to be done by a certain age. But the Brazilian veteran also can’t ignore the reality of his situation — he’s been an active competitor across grappling and MMA for more than 20 years, and that kind of mileage adds up on anybody.
“I don’t know how many more fights I’ve got in me,” Burns said. “Because even before I started doing MMA, I’m doing jiu-jitsu for a while. Since I was 15 or 16, I was competing a lot. So it’s been very tough to keep up with the little injuries, the little stuff that before was [putting ice on it] and one [physical therapy session] and it was gone. Now it’s taking a little bit more. It’s a whole week for a little injury and get better. I’m training and I’m keeping up with that but it’s not been easy.
“I’m investing a lot of money in a cold plunge, sauna, physical therapy … that’s what I do all day. I train, I podcast once a week, and then other than that, recovery, training, recovery, massages, stretches, this and that, mobility, hyperbaric chamber, ice, sauna. That’s my life. I’ve got a couple more fights in me, but not a whole lot of fights in me. Again, I’m here to beat this guy, beat one more guy, get my title shot and get the title. You guys enjoy it while I’m here, because I’m not here for a long time.”
There’s an old adage in MMA that fighters need to retire from the sport before the sport retires them.
Burns subscribes to that philosophy because the last thing he wants to do is overstay his welcome and suffer the kinds of losses that transform him from a top-ranked contender to a cautionary tale for the next generation of athletes.
He looks at a current situation with former interim lightweight champion Tony Ferguson, who was once considered the biggest threat to Khabib Nurmagomedov but now sits with eight straight losses on his résumé and his UFC run likely at its end. Even with the struggles he’s faced lately, Ferguson remains committed to fighting whether he’s in the UFC or not.
“I won’t be in that situation,” Burns promised. “I saw the Matt Brown thing [about Ferguson] and I agree with him. I do believe this is a mental health issue that a lot of fighters have. We saw a lot of fighters, even my guy Dustin Poirier [saying], ‘I need a date! I need a date!’ Bro, you don’t need a date.
“You don’t need to fight. You want to fight. It’s different. It’s different when you need to fight and when you want to fight.”
Brown addressed Ferguson refusing to retire during a recent episode of MMA Fighting’s The Fighter vs. The Writer and chalked it up to the same reason why most athletes have such a hard time walking away from the sport. It all comes down to chasing the euphoric high that accompanies competing in UFC, because that’s the kind of rush nothing else can ever duplicate.
Burns understands how that feels, but he refuses to let the thrill of fighting potentially diminish his long-term health just because he refuses to stop.
“I like when Matt Brown said we’re chasing that adrenaline dump with the win, making the guy quit and have that arm raised and all that. We love that,” Burns said. “But we cannot get caught up in that, and I think I learned those lessons when I had those three fights in five months when I fought Neil Magny back in Brazil and I won, and then I fought [Jorge] Masvidal in April, and a couple weeks after I tried to fight Belal [Muhammad], and that was mental health that I think I had a little bit of an issue. I just beat Masvidal, not the way I wanted, and then I needed one more. I need to [feel] this again.
“Then when I got a fight with Belal, I kind of felt like I wasn’t at my best. I wasn’t peaking. I just peaked twice in a row. I wasn’t peaking. Once I got there, I got injured. It made me reflect a lot, working on psychology. Like, I want to have that adrenaline. It’s not that I want to win. I was just talking to myself, talking to my coaches, convincing everybody that I wanted to fight but at that moment, I wanted to have that feeling again. It’s kind of like an addiction.”
As he prepares to fight Brady this weekend, Burns truly believes he can get a dominant finish and set himself up for an even bigger matchup that would put him back into title contention in the near future.
But eventually Burns knows he’s going to have to make that call to end his career, and like it or not, that’s going to come sooner rather than later.
“I don’t have like 10 more fights in me,” Burns said. “I might have like five around that, maybe a little bit more fights, and I want to go in peace like Robbie Lawler did. We’ve been talking a lot and he said, ‘Go in peace.’ Whenever you don’t want to compete a lot more in the training, whenever you’re slowing down, that’s it. I’m not putting a date, I’m not putting a number of fights, but I’m going to try to go out the smart way.
“I go out there and I finish Sean Brady, it’s got to be a big fight [next]. It’s got to be a No. 1 contender fight. If I’ve got to wait, OK. If I’ve got to wait a little bit on Shavkat [Rakhmonov] and these guys are next, so give me Kamaru [Usman], give me Colby [Covington], give me whoever is there, Leon [Edwards], and then after that I want a title shot. That’s my goal.”
