Dustin Poirier is retired from MMA, but it’s clear he still has a strong desire to keep competing in some form or another.
“The Diamond” was on The Joe Rogan Experience earlier this week and discussed the difficulty in switching gears to ‘civilian’ life now that he’s officially retired from UFC at 36 years of age.
“I don’t know who I am without fighting,” he admitted. “I’m a father. I’m a husband. I’m a lot of things. But fighting was a cloud in my mind that never went away for 20 years, right? And
now I wake up and it’s it’s gone. Like what do I do? I’m still trying to find out. I don’t know.”
One option Poirier likes the idea of is boxing, but he’s still technically under contract with the UFC so he’d have to do it under the Zuffa banner. And according to Dustin, Zuffa Boxing isn’t interested.
“That’s something I would like to do, man. Box,” he said. “I always wanted to have a couple before I [retired], but I’m still under contract. Even though I’m retired, I still have a contract with the UFC. Trust me, I already pitched it to them. Me and Nate Diaz, Zuffa Boxing, let’s go. 170, whatever. 168, super middleweight, let’s do it.They don’t want any crossover.”
“They must hate money,” he joked with Rogan. “They hate money.”
“They want to be taken by the boxing world serious,” Poirier added. “And I think if you open that door of a MMA guy fighting under Zuffa boxing, every guy on the roster, every girl on the roster is going to want to do the same. It just becomes a mess … I think there are some really fun MMA boxing match ups you can make.”
One big advantage to boxing is how much easier the training is.
“Just thinking about a boxing training camp, dude, with no grappling, no wrestling,” Poirier said. “Just run, conditioning, and boxing. It would be smooth sailing, dude. I would love it.”
“I would just love to lace em up and box professionally, once.”
We’ve been bagging on the UFC a lot lately, and it’s exactly because of stuff like this. The world of combat sports could be so much more fun if the UFC said yes a little more than no. Yes to interesting match-ups. Yes to cool walkouts. Yes to a crossover fight here and there.
Back in the day we were fine with all the nos because we were seeing the best fight the best, which was better than having a bunch of freakshow fights messing up momentum. But there’s no momentum now. The best aren’t fighting the best. Can we at least get something fun like Dustin Poirier boxing other aged UFC legends? No? No. Okay.
