More accurately, it had him at no snow, and as he prepped for Saturday’s bout with Carlos Ulberg, the former resident of New England was ecstatic that he didn’t have to shovel.
“I’m not missing anything up there,” he said. “This is a great lifestyle I’m living over here.”
It’s not just the weather that sent him down the east coast. Instead, after a test run with the Sanford MMA squad in Deerfield Beach, he decided that he would make his home there for the time being.
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“It’s the gym that I wanted to go to,” Cherant said. “It was everything. The people there, the coaches – look at the names that are there. How could it not be a good fit for anybody?”
Well, not every gym is for everybody, but in Cherant’s case, while he got good work in New England that got him to the UFC, now that he’s at the top level of the sport, he needed to act accordingly.
“I needed change and I changed,” said the Brooklyn native who will still rep Wrentham, Mass. on fight night. “If you need change in your life, why not take a risk? If you’re not ready to risk, what’s the purpose of being in there? I’m in the UFC, the biggest tank with a lot of sharks in there, and I have to be able to compete. Being in Massachusetts, it makes no sense training there when there’s not a lot of big guys there.”