Benoit Saint Denis had a huge opportunity in front of him at UFC 299, and he wasn’t going to let anything stop him from taking it, including a brutal fight camp, as well as a staph infection.
Dustin Poirier ended up knocking Saint Denis out in Round 2 of the March co-main event in an incredible battle. As Saint Denis prepares to headline Saturday’s UFC Paris event in front of his home crowd, he reflected on the lessons learned from challenging one of the greatest lightweights of all time.
“I learned a lot,” Saint Denis told MMA Fighting. “First, I learned that you have to underestimate nobody, especially top fighters like that, and you can’t go out there not being healthy. That’s huge. But, despite that, I learned a lot. Nothing comes by mistake, I believe if I had this staph infection this late into my camp, it’s because I was stressed and I took no pleasure in my training camp.
“I had a lot of stuff, new stuff to manage that I was not used to. When you become somebody in the sport, you then have the shoulders of a CEO because you have all the staff and the management around you, a lot of people and you deal with the new stuff that is difficult to when it’s brand new. It takes time to have that experience. I believe being at the top is also a [tough] experience, and being able to manage your schedule and to still enjoy the process of being a fighter. It’s the most important thing and to make the people that are with you proud of your performance, and to have people with you that you want to make proud of the performance you are gonna deliver.
“So this is important. We made a lot of adjustments and I’m really happy now. And I took pleasure in training and I will take pleasure in my fight.”
Saint Denis revealed his staph infection following the loss, which led to a horrible weight cut, and just a bad fight week in general. Deep down, Saint Denis considered withdrawing, but after weighing his options, he felt either way could be potentially disrespectful to Poirier; face him at less than 100 percent, but still have the chance to score the biggest win of his career, or feel like “The Diamond” wasted weeks and weeks of training to not fight.
“It was disrespectful to go out there against a guy of this level being in such a bad condition,” Saint Denis said. “But it was also disrespectful to call the fight [off] during fight week [for a fight] the guy has been preparing hard for. It was a dilemma for me and it had been bringing a lot of stress during the fight week to not know what to do. It was a hard situation.
“You know, I believe guys like Khabib [Nurmagomedov], and top [teams] that they have a lot of experience. They have called a lot of fights during the fight week because of a bad cut, or because of a staph infection. And yeah, it was hard for me because me and my team, we are coming, not out of nowhere, but I was the first guy of my team to co-headline such an event and to be at this level though. We don’t have experience with those kind of opportunities. So Tuesday [of fight week] we [made] the decision to go through and to do whatever I can in the condition that [I was] in.
“It was a difficult, it was bad times but I think like I said, it doesn’t come by accident. I have been through this situation because I had a lack of professionalism in managing my stuff [with] my weight, and a lot of stuff that I had to professionalize. .. It was a huge fight, huge opportunity for me, but it was a training camp where I was al almost in depression. So I believe if you [want to perform], you want to have huge performance, you have to be happy to do what you love, and and then be happy to deliver the best performance you can to everybody.”
With hindsight being what it is, the lessons learned outweighed the results from UFC 299. Poirier went on to challenge for the lightweight title, coming up short in a Fight of the Year contender at UFC 302 in June.
Saint Denis didn’t let that get him down, and in the end, the story of that loss is an important chapter in the “God of War” story.
“I cannot have regrets because it’s a lesson,” Saint Denis said. “All the stuff that went bad [before the fight I had to manage], but I have absolutely no regrets because I was lucky enough that the fight went well for me for as long as it went. So I’m a lucky man.”
