Khabib Nurmagomedov is one of the few fighters who walked away from the UFC at the top of their game — a perfect 29-0 and with the lightweight belt wrapped around his waist. Some fans and fighters have
given him flak for the decision to listen to his mother and step away from the sport after his father / coach Abdulmanap died. But Khabib explained his reasoning in a new conversation at the Miftaah Institute.
“I saw a lot of rumors why I retired, because of this or that,” Nurmagomedov said of his decision. “I think if my father was still alive he would have made me fight a little bit longer, because I just turned 32 when I finished. But he passed away and it was very honest, a good conversation with her. It’s hard to explain. Everything happened so fast.”
Khabib described the pressure he was under to step back into the cage for October, 2020 despite his father dying of COVID three months earlier in July.
“When father passed away, I didn’t even have time to think what to do,” he said. “Because they make interim title [for Justin Gaethje in May]. Then father passed away, and UFC told me, ‘We’re gonna give you one month off, after one month come back to us.’ What are you gonna do? It was a very difficult situation.”
“From one side it was the whole world waiting for this fight,” he said. “And the other side, I have this deal, what happened with me and my father and my mother on the other side. And I chose what mother wished.”
Despite being committed to staying retired, Khabib has continued his father’s work training some of the toughest fighters to come out of Dagestan and the surrounding regions. He built a new $5 million facility in Makhachkala named after his father, and he continues to mentor Abdulmanap’s other protege Islam Makhachev coming into this weekend’s UFC 322 main event.
That’s exactly what his father would want him to do.
“All of our conversations were about the future,” Khabib said of his father. “What we can do about projects, about our plan, about the guys, about the team. All about investing in people, all about supporting people. My father was never a very big businessman or something like this, but he was always investing with his knowledge and energy to help people. It was his life goal.”
