EDMONTON, Alberta, Canada – [autotag]Mike Malott[/autotag] was surprised by the end of his most recent fight as well as the immediate aftermath, but he hopes he’s better from it.
On the wrong side of a Comeback of the Year candidate, Malott (10-2-1 MMA, 3-1 UFC) lost by third-round TKO to Neil Magny in January. Nine-and-a-half months later, Malott hopes to show off the lessons he’s learned Saturday when he takes on Trevin Giles (16-6 MMA, 7-6 UFC) at UFC Fight Night 246 at Rogers Place.
“You’ve just got to reassess and see what went wrong,” Malott told MMA Junkie and other reporters at a pre-fight news conference Wednesday. “I feel like you do the same thing after a win, right? See what you can improve on? But it’s how much do you want to dive into that. You can write it off to being like, ‘Well, I won 14 minutes of that fight and just made a couple of bad decisions at the end and a couple things went wrong, so if I just don’t do those, then I’ll be fine next time and I beat that guy nine times out of 10. Or we can do what we did.
“It’s like, look, it’s probably the symptom of a much larger problem that we didn’t recognize as much. How do we dive into that and figure out where we can get the most growth? That’s what we did. So the last nine (or) 10 months, I’ve been focused on improvement and growth and getting back in here to be the most confident version of myself, the most prepared for the fight that I can possibly be.”
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The loss was one thing. The blowback afterward was another entirely.
Given Malott was a hot prospect pedestaled as the next torch bearer for Canadian MMA, opportunists emerged out of the digital woodwork to kick him while he was down.
“I’ll be honest. It was surprising at first,” Malott said. “I assumed there would be some negative criticism. But man, I was blown away by how many people were waiting for me to fall. But also on the opposite side, too, we can focus on that all day. There’s a ton of negativity you can focus on, but there’s also a ton of positivity. A ton of people messaged me and were like, ‘Look, man. You obviously showed some great stuff in that fight. You were winning the majority of that fight.’ It’s not like I got steamrolled for 15 minutes and have to rethink my entire game.
“Again, I think I win that fight most times. If we run that fight back however many times, I think I win the vast majority of those fights. I think I showed some solid skills in that fight, but I also showed some things that need to be improved. We just focused on what needs to be improved the last eight or nine months or whatever. Again at first, it was a little bit surprising. It got to me for the first week or two. I was really down on myself about it a little bit. But once I was able to get back in the gym and actually make or take steps toward making improvements and resolving issues, that kind of took care of itself.”
Now Malott has a shot at redemption. The circumstances are similar in some ways, as he has the opportunity to prove himself in his home country against a veteran fighter.
“It would’ve been nice to fight in July (in Denver as was scheduled), the fight that I prepared for,” Malott said, referring to his canceled bout vs. Gilbert Urbina. “But I’d much rather pull out of a fight in Denver than a fight in Edmonton. I’m excited to get back in front of those Canadian fans.”
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC Fight Night 246.