“It was just kind of like a whirlwind and I never really had the time to settle and figure out what I needed to do to climb, the route I needed to take,” he said. “An opportunity popped up and I said yes. An opportunity popped up and I said yes. Now looking back, I was looking at my fighting career like it was a sprint, and I was just racing to the top. And that’s just not a smart way.”
Stamann kept fighting killers like Aljamain Sterling, Song Yadong, Brian Kelleher, Jimmie Rivera and Merab Dvalishvili, but more often than not, he wasn’t getting the results he wanted. And after the loss to Dvalishvili last May, he needed to re-evaluate everything.
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“I think in a lot of ways I fell out of love with the sport,” he said. “It’s just the pressure and things that come with being in the UFC and it took the fun out of it for me and I needed a few months to fall in love with the sport again. It’s hard, and if you don’t love it, it just wears on you.
But I learned the lesson, I learned the hard way like I learned most lessons in life, and I’m ready to really handle business and climb.”
The climb back begins officially against Nurmagomedov this weekend, but it really started in a year that most would describe as a disappointing one for the 32-year-old. Stamann wouldn’t agree.
“It was a weird year,” he admits. “I really thought I would be fighting more. Having a fight canceled the day of the fight, and then losing a fight, that doesn’t make for a great professional resume, but I can’t look back at the year and be like, man, 2021 was a bad year for me because it really wasn’t. It was a really good year. I bought a couple houses, I did a lot outside of fighting that maybe I wouldn’t have done if I had been in a fight camp for the entire year. So 2021 was actually a great year in my life, but that’s not what people see.”