Joaquin Buckley entered last year with heaps of momentum, having capped off his second-half call-up to the UFC by registering one of the most impressive knockouts of all-time and following it up with a second straight blistering performance.
Brandishing a 12-3 record, coming off back-to-back Performance of the Night-winning efforts, “New Mansa” was primed and ready to continue making waves in his first full year on the UFC roster.
And then Alessio di Chirico knocked him out in a little more than two minutes, bringing all that momentum to a screeching halt.
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After the bout, he knew it was time to make some serious changes.
“I don’t put it on nobody for not knowing, but a lot of people don’t realize that I wasn’t a full-time fighter at the time, so I didn’t have the camps and the capabilities to go place-to-place and s*** like I’m doing now,” explained Buckley, who makes his 2022 debut on Saturday in an explosive pairing with Abdul Razak Alhassan. “Now I’m able to train every day. I wasn’t doing that when I fought Kevin Holland, when I fought Impa (Kasanganay), when I fought Jordan Wright. I wasn’t a full-time fighter.
“As soon as I got knocked out, I said, ‘F*** that! I gotta find something new.’ I made the switch that day,” he added with a booming laugh. “After I lost to Alessio, it showed me, ‘These dudes do this s*** all day, every day, and I’ve got to do the same thing!’”
Going all-in on his fighting career involved getting rid of the financial safety net most fighters maintain when they’re competing on the regional circuit or in the very early days of competing on the big stage.
For Buckley, that meant walking into Walgreens and telling his boss that he had to stop working.
“I wanted to keep my job there and just stay committed to getting another check,” said the powerful middleweight, whose spinning back kick knockout of Kasanganay went viral and remains one of the signature finishes of the last five years in all of MMA. “My Walgreens check don’t match up to the UFC, but at the end of the day, they’re consistent, so I wanted to save my UFC checks and continue to work because it’s a great, easy job.