LAS VEGAS – If not for a stroke of luck, [autotag]Jose Johnson[/autotag] might not be a UFC fighter, but he doesn’t completely see it that way.
Competing in front of [autotag]Dana White[/autotag] for the fourth time, Johnson (15-7) was finally able to impress the UFC boss when he defeated formerly unbeaten Jack Cartwright on Tuesday at Dana White’s Contender Series 50. Afterward, Johnson was emotional during his interview with Laura Sanko.
“I fought so much to be here today,” Johnson said, trying to hold back tears. “People say because of my record that I shouldn’t be here. I’ve overcome some things that people don’t even understand. I went through team switches, divorce, everything. I lost custody of my kid. I’m fighting for it now. It’s just so much that happened. I’m just glad I could be here today talking to you.”
White doesn’t normally listen to Sanko’s interviews with DWCS winners so as not to be influenced by what he hears, but he said he happened to put on his headset while sitting cageside. What he heard apparently swayed White’s decision on Johnson.
“His interview got him the contract tonight, that’s it,” White told reporters, including MMA Junkie. “The fight was weird. He beat a 10-0 kid, came here the second time, laid out. It’s easy to sit up here and f*cking yap about this and that. You don’t know where half these kids come from or what they go through or what it took for them to be here tonight. Well, he laid it out. He got me. I said, ‘You know what? I’m going to give him the opportunity. The rest is up to him.”
However, Johnson, who is on a three-fight winning streak, said it also has to do with the fact that he never stopped fighting despite various missed opportunities to sign with the UFC.
“I think it was a little bit of a combination of both,” Johnson told reporters. “He already knew the story. The story changed a lot since then, and he felt it, and he heard it, but then he also looked at the hard work that was put in behind it. A lot of people in the situation that I was put in would have just given up. After back-to-back losses in front of Dana White, they would have just put the gloves down. And me? I didn’t.”
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