He’s not kidding. And even now, at 28, the lightweight prospect is one of the steadiest, most well-adjusted humans you will ever meet. He may say that he hasn’t evolved since he first stepped on to a jiu-jitsu mat when he was a kid, but perhaps he was already as close to a finished product as is possible at that age.
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Yeah, it’s not the usual story, but Solecki is fine with being a unicorn in the sport, as long as he gets to do what he loves to do – compete – and then get back home to his wife Kacey and daughter Nora Lynn in North Carolina. The rest of the stuff that comes with being a highly touted up and comer with an unbeaten UFC record? He’ll pass.
“I was telling my wife, if I could fight and then I get done and my coaches get to stand in the cage and talk about what they saw and get a little bit of notoriety and get their moment in the sun, and I can go home and dump the bag of money on the table to my wife and daughter and go back to training on Monday, that’s my reward,” he said.
“I love fighting, I love the training, I love the grind. Selfishly, I wanted to do this so that I could do something I love every day, but that’s my reward. I don’t care if anybody thinks I’m good or better than I was or worse than I was. I just want to do this and work as hard as I can and try to give back to everybody else the best I can.”
This weekend in Las Vegas, Solecki attempts to make it four for four in the Octagon when he faced Jared Gordon at the UFC APEX. It’s another stiff test for the Dana White’s Contender Series graduate, but when your first three wins in the big show are over Matt Wiman, Austin Hubbard and Jim Miller, you’re used to the deep end of the pool.