Travis Browne Looking To Make Big Changes After ‘Ass Whooping’ From Fabricio Werdum
Travis Browne hit another hurdle in his hunt for a title at UFC on Fox 11, dropping a one-sided decision loss to Fabricio Werdum and picking up a pretty nasty beat down in the process. ‘Vai Cavalo’ looked better than ‘Hapa’ on the night and goes on to meet champion Cain Velasquez at UFC 180 for his efforts.
Now left with some serious food for thought, Browne stopped by to talk with MMAFighting.com about his plans:
“For any fighter, I feel like when it hits the fan and you just are relying on instinct, what are your habits? What do you go back to, just naturally?” Browne explained. “And for me it’s trying to give big shots and trying to knock you out. But just like every other athlete, as you evolve in this sport, you start to be scouted, you start to be looked at, and guys now know I have that power to come back at any point in the fight, so they start avoiding that one big shot. That’s what Werdum did a great job of.”
Browne’s left hand was broken in the early goings of his scrap with Werdum, and inevitably affected his overall performance during the five round affair. ‘Hapa’ takes nothing away from ‘Vai Cavalo’, and realizes he must switch things up from now on:
“It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to deal with,” Browne said of the loss “Because everything aside, I don’t make excuses. Werdum whooped my ass, and that’s what I had to come to terms to. He just straight up kicked my ass. It doesn’t matter about injuries. It was me. And that’s one thing that I’ve learned, I beat myself in that fight and I need to figure out what I need to do in the future to change that. I need to go back and reassess a lot of things in my career and really figure out what I need to put in place in order to be successful again. “
Props to Browne for not making any excuses, and this isn’t the first time that this has happened; ‘Hapa’ suffered a brutal TKO loss against Antonio ‘Bigfoot’ Silva in 2012, the first loss of his career, and it came shortly after his knee blew out in round one. Perhaps over training is an issue with the Hawaiian knockout artist?
“People look at it, ‘oh, you’re taking it kind of rough, this is just one loss, you had an off night, why are you saying that you have to reassess everything?’ And it’s because in this game, when you lose once, you could be one fight away from getting cut. So if you don’t make the changes in your life that you feel you need to make to be successful again, then you risk running that loss again. So from A to Z, I’m making changes.”
We’ll see how Browne comes back from just his second professional loss, but I believe there is still time for him to make the changes needed. A little more patience, and some game planning may be in order for ‘Hapa’, and there is no-one better for that than Jackson’s MMA. There is no doubt that Browne can hand, and bang, at the highest level, but will he get that elusive title shot?
