Regardless of what happened Saturday at UFC 281 in New York, Frankie Edgar would’ve gone down as a legend in history, but a knockout loss in his final MMA fight is a tough pill to swallow.
Edgar, who was brutally finished with a knee by Chris Gutierrez early in their main card bout, gave a brief post-fight interview in the cage but was not medically cleared to speak to reporters after the event.
Tuesday, Edgar discussed his loss in-depth for the first time on his podcast The Champ & The Tramp. Clearly emotionally distressed by the loss, Edgar tried to put into words the mix of emotions he feels days later.
“Obviously, (I’m) heartbroken,” Edgar said. “That’s not the way I wanted it to go, but that’s the way it goes. I had a great week, awesome week out there. It was incredible, the love I got from everybody. The UFC gave me love, the little video that they did. From my peers, my peers are the most important. … I was zooming in the back. I felt like I was on in the back. I go out there and boom. Obviously, you saw it. Everybody saw it.”
Though disappointed, Edgar finds comfort in knowing the mass amount of supporters he has in his corner. At a pre-fight news conference Wednesday in New York, Edgar was audibly the most popular of all of the main card fighters. There were booming cheers and “Frankie” chants every few minutes.
“It f*cking sucks but how can I complain, to be honest?” Edgar said. “People were cheering my name the whole time before, during, after. I worked hard to get where I got, like f*cking hard, very hard. I sacrificed a lot in my life. I put my all into my athletic career since Day 1, but who am I to complain? There are people out there who work hard and they just make it by. I know both sides of that. I’m just trying to be grateful for what I accomplished, for the ride I had.”
In the weeks that follow, Edgar expects to deal with the mental effects of not only a loss, but knowing he won’t compete again inside the cage. Edgar opened up about his family’s struggles with the results in the wake of his defeat.
“I didn’t want my kids to see me go out that way (with) my family there, all that stuff,” Edgar said. “They’ve got to go deal with it, too. My kids are old enough now where kids are scumbags. I’m not going to say where, who, or which kid, but I have already one of my kids does something in their group and one of the kids in the group is talking sh*t, saying this and that. Either that kid is being a young scumbag kid or his parents don’t teach him his f*cking manners. I don’t know. Whatever. They’re kids in the end, but it sucks my kid’s gotta deal with it. I can eat all that stuff. I shouldn’t feel that way. I try not to feel that way, but it is embarrassing, still to me.”
Edgar expects wounds to heal with time. He’s not sure what’s next, though many MMA options are on the table, he indicated, whether coaching, gym ownership, UFC ambassadorship, or management.
“It’s in my rearview, it’s just f*cking close in the rearview right now,” Edgar said. “But it’s going to get further away like everything does. In the big scheme of things, how f*cking important is it? I don’t know. It would’ve been nice to go away on a high note. That’s all I wanted. That’s what I thought was going to happen. What sucks, too, is I didn’t even get to f*cking go. Maybe it would’ve been better if I just f*cking went and put on a heartfelt performance out there and lost a f*cking decision or something like that. If I was able to walk away with some bruises knowing like, ‘Yo, I f*cking put it on the line again.’ I put it on the line, but in a different way.”
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC 281.
