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Yahoo Sports MMA contributor Ben Fowlkes chatted with welterweight Belal Muhammad on his dislike for his next opponent, Leon Edwards, and why he’ll beat him at UFC 304.
Video Transcript
Ben Volks here for Yahoo Sports.
I’m with Bilal Muhammad who fights UFC welterweight champion Leon Edwards at UFC 304 in Manchester.
Now, first of all, Bilal, I gotta say I was a little bit surprised.
I’ve heard some of the comments that you were saying uh coming into this fight, how at one point you said you expected this to be a pretty easy fight, which I think a lot of people would look at Leon and what he’s been doing lately and think that there’s, uh there’s no easy fights against him.
What do you see that makes you think that uh this one you’re gonna walk through him?
I just think that the version of myself that I am now, I’m the best welter rate in a division, the best welter rate on planet earth right now.
And I think that you see my last three or four fights.
Uh None of them have been hard.
They’ve all been dominant wins, dominant victories.
And I think I’m gonna do the same thing to Leon Edwards.
I always find out, you know, your weakness.
I always find out a strategy to beat you a way to beat you and Leon is no different whether he has a title or not.
I’m gonna show you guys why I’m better than him.
What do you take from that first vitamin?
It was a few years ago.
Do you think it’s still relevant?
Did it have something to teach you?
Even if you know, you guys only got one full round in?
Not much.
Right.
It was three years ago.
I’m a whole different fighter than, than I was back then.
And just a level of opponents that I fought since then have all been different styles.
I fought the striker, the grappler, the wrestler, the, the knockout artist and every single one of those camps, I’ve learned something new from each guy and I’ve gotten better every single camp.
So, uh I just been nothing but in the gym grinding hard every single day for this one moment for this one match.
And I was always looking at it as whoever is the champion.
I was gonna fight that guy.
But now that it’s Leon Edwards, it just makes it that much better, right?
Because it’s the guy that I dislike a guy that I hate and a guy that when we were supposed to fight back then, it was supposed to be a small show on the Apex.
Nobody was there.
Now we’re fighting on the biggest stage in his home country in front of, uh you know, a huge crowd and it’s gonna be that much more epic when I beat him?
No, the is it helpful to have Ben in the cage with the guy?
Even if you guys didn’t get to get a resolution of that fight because of the I poke?
Is it helpful to have Ben in there to have felt his power?
His seen his speed kind of felt the range a little bit.
Yeah.
You, you know, you, you always take something a little bit, right.
You take how you felt in the cage, you take how you size up to him, how his speed is, how his strength is.
You get little things from it.
But like I said, it’s three years ago.
So there’s not much that hasn’t changed on my end and I’m assuming a lot changed from him.
Now, a lot of, a lot of people have talked about the unconventional start time for this one, you know, to accommodate the UF CS pay per view schedule back in North America, you know, could be 5 a.m. or so by the time you guys are fighting, how do you prepare for that?
I mean, because it’ll be prime time for the time zone you’re used to now, but you’ll be going there uh, before the fight and everything.
So how do you plan for a situation where we’re gonna be fighting in the early morning hours?
I mean, I mean, I think me be trying to just stay on American time zone.
I’m going out there fight week, uh, like a normal fight week and I’m gonna be trying to sleep during the day.
The UFC did a good job of like adjusting a lot of the schedule for, you know, you know, more midday stuff, night, evening stuff for, uh, weigh ins for interviews and things like that.
So I think just one of those things where I just gotta make sure that I’m sleeping at the right times, waking up during the right times.
But at the end of the day, it’s a fist fight and whether it’s day or night, if he’s standing in front of me, I’m gonna be wide awake.
Now.
You campaigned really hard for a title shot and it seemed like you had to beat just about everybody in the welterweight division before you finally got it.
Were there any moments of frustration during that time?
Thinking, man, what is it gonna take?
Is it ever gonna come?
Yeah.
I mean, there’s always those moments of frustration, the fact that it took so long, but I think it only hurts Leon because all that time, it only made me get better.
Every single in all aspects of the game.
Every single one of my uh martial arts is grown so much so I just keep getting better every single day.
And now that it took this long, I’m just gonna be a way better version of myself than I was a year ago than I was two years ago.
Uh this is gonna be the best Baal Mohammad they’ve ever seen.
Now, when I was talking to Leon and I’ve heard this a similar thing from some of Leon’s management where they were kind of saying, you know what we, he’s Leon did say there’s no way you can say Bilal hasn’t earned a title shot.
He absolutely has.
But we also felt like, man, he doesn’t bring a lot of star power that we were hoping for somebody who would sell a whole bunch of pay per views.
And we don’t know if Bilal is that guy.
What do you think when you hear that?
Because it seems like you’re very accessible to fans online, uh you know, fans don’t have a problem remembering the name.
Uh What do you make of when people say, hey, the guy is not a big enough star, he’s not a draw.
It’s funny coming from his team because the guy doesn’t even like to do social media.
He doesn’t push himself, he doesn’t brand himself, he doesn’t, you know, promote himself.
Like even with this fight, it’s you try to say something to the guy and the guy doesn’t respond back.
So even in the Kobe fight, there is really no back and forth and Kobe is the easiest guy to go back and forth with so his team could say whatever they want to say, but they’re the ones not selling, they’re the ones not pushing anything.
And fans in general, I think fans are clueless with who they think is a draw and who they think is itself there.
Couple guys in the UFC, they’re gonna sell a million pay reviews.
There’s a couple guys in UFC, they’re gonna sell 500,000 pay reviews.
And at the end of the day, it’s just about winning.
It’s about getting the, the victory and staying on top and it’s gonna come with time, it’s gonna come, you’ll, you’ll find, you’ll find your year where all of a sudden you explode.
Nobody knew who Maz at all was, you know, before he knocked out there until then all of a sudden he had this superstardom.
Nobody cared who he was, but it just happens.
It just shows up and it’s gonna happen for me.
Well, is some of the comments leading up to this fight?
Is that you thinking like, hey, let’s get a little heat under this fight.
I, I asked Leon if he thought that, you know, is he, do you think he’s trying to hype up the fight with this?
Leon said, I think that he’s delusional and I, but uh I’ve heard all the people say like, hey, we think that this is Bilal’s attempt to, to show like, OK, here I, you want some hype behind this fight?
I can give you some.
Is that like a conscious choice?
No, I mean, I really hate this guy.
I don’t like this guy at all.
He’s a he’s a dork.
He’s a loser.
And, uh, like I said, the fact that the way the first fight happened and he avoided me the whole time since then.
Uh, it’s only fueled me and whether I, I keep it real, I don’t have to fake anything to try to promote something.
Like I said, I thought so many nice guys in the UFC, like Wonder Boy, uh, even go with Burns.
Luke.
All these guys were all nice guys.
Then I had guys like John Brady who wanted to talk trash and it built up, you know, a different side of me in the fight game.
I’m from Chicago.
I love to talk trash.
I love to, to, to have that type of animosity in a fight.
So this is only gonna make the fight better for me that I disliked Leon.
Now you and I talked a few years ago and I remember you saying how you had really changed the way you approach sparring that, you know, you didn’t spar with people.
You don’t know, you need to make sure that you can trust that somebody is gonna, you know, be in there helping you protect your brains over a long term.
What are some of the other things like when you are approaching a fight?
Now?
Do you ever think back?
Like, hey, I wish I’d known this three or four years ago?
Like what, what are the things that you approach fights with now that you feel like this is the product of experience in this game.
Uh I think a huge part in spring and spring the right way with the right training partners having guys in the gym that wanna see you win that there’s no ego involved and you know, they’re adjusting their style to your opponent instead of them just trying to, you don’t have to win every round.
You don’t have to win every practice.
The goal is to get better from practicing.
Not to say, oh, I beat so and so five times, I practice.
Lol yes on the beast.
Uh because at the end of the day, practice is just to sharpen yourself up for the fight.
So practices only matter when you’re, you’re getting better and growing instead of just saying I won and I did enough just to win at practice.
Well, last thing for you and I’ll let you go.
Uh You know, obviously you’ve been waiting for this moment for a long time.
If you go in there, you win in, you know, kind of Leon’s backyard in England there and you become the champion.
What do you think that’s gonna feel like to, you know, I won’t say wake up Sunday morning so much as go back to the hotel, uh Sunday morning.
Uh and be like, wow, I, I got there, I’m UFC champ.
Uh I mean, it’s gonna prove my team myself, my family, right?
That we did all the right things.
We took the long road with the, the hard road and it was worth it.
Everything that we had to wait, the delays, the, the hate, the, the, the doubts.
Uh It only got me to this point that I am at now and uh you know, I’m just gonna be blessed on that day.
Well, awesome.
Thank you for taking a minute bal.
We’ll let you go and uh we appreciate the time.
Thank you brother.
I appreciate you.