Dan Hooker has cleared up any speculation on his potential retirement.
Hooker (20-10 MMA, 10-6 UFC) suffered perhaps the most heartbreaking loss of his career when he was stopped by Michael Chandler in the first round at UFC 257. The TKO loss marked the first time Hooker was stopped due to head strikes.
Following the loss, Hooker proceeded to remove his gloves in the octagon, which sparked rumblings of “The Hangman” possibly calling it quits. But in his first interview post-UFC 257, Hooker clarified those rumors, claiming that while that thought may have sprung up for a second, he’s not done yet.
“You’re always frustrated after a loss,” Hooker told “Submission Radio.” “Yeah, like, a balance of everything. Like, of sheer frustration, you’re disappointed. And then you get back to the hotel. In that moment, I was like, ‘I’m done. I’m finished with this (expletive) sport. I’m done.’ And then you get back to the hotel, and you sit down and think about it, and you realize you’re not good at anything else either. I was kind of thinking, (expletive), I’ve kind of painted myself into a bit of a corner here.
“Yeah, people think you’re going to be rolling around in depression and then not getting out of bed, but I know what it is. This is a sport I’ve been doing and following for my entire adult life. So, it’s always a possibility. But you’re not like rolling around. Like, a loss like this, you’re not rolling around in depression, like super upset. It’s kind of self-explanatory, and it is what is. I can honestly say, I’m not any more upset than when I lost the (Dustin) Poirier fight.”
Chandler (22-5 MMA, 1-0 UFC) was able to apply pressure early, giving Hooker no opportunities to get going. Midway through Round 1, Chandler clipped Hooker with an overhand left and rained down a barrage of punches to finish the fight.
The loss was a tough pill to swallow for Hooker, but what makes it even harder is that he now has to spend an entire month in Dubai, as well as undergo mandatory quarantine in New Zealand, before returning home to his family.
“What can you say? What can you say? You have good days, bad days,” Hooker said. “And like, you prepare, you go into these kinds of things and you prepare yourself for the worst-case scenario, but even that took the cake. Even that surprised me how bad it went. That was the very surprising thing. So, what can you say? What can you say? I have no words to describe that. You come to, and then you’re just like, ‘Wow, I’ve just wasted four months, four months of my life for that.’”
Hooker offered up no excuses on his loss to Chandler and just simply chalked it off to a bad night at the office.
“That’s the funny thing, I zigged when I should have zagged; that’s all it is.” Hooker said. “Fighting is like a mixture of thinking and your reactions. You’re balancing your processed thought and then your reactions. I felt like I was calm, could see everything, was thinking, was sharp in there, just relied on my reaction to get out of the way of that punch, and it let me down. Yeah, it’s hard to describe. It’s like such an obvious error and such a very costly mistake.”
“He changed levels. I think I relied on my reaction time. He sold the level change well. I thought he was going for a takedown, comes upstairs with a punch. There’s a million things I could’ve done that would’ve changed that. There’s a million different reactions that I could’ve done and that not happen. But it did. What can you do? I certainly don’t have a time machine. I think Floyd Mayweather has a time machine. If anyone has a time machine, Floyd Mayweather has a time machine. I do not have a time machine.”
Dan Hooker: Removing gloves after Michael Chandler loss was ‘sheer frustration’ not retirement
