Yair Rodriguez’s Coach Hopes His Fighter Avoids Another War Following UFC Denver

Yair Rodriguez was in a war with Chan Sung Jung and his coach would prefer if he doesn’t see another fight like that for him again.

Rodriguez and the “Korean Zombie” did battle inside the Pepsi Center in Denver, Colorado. The bout headlined UFC Denver, which celebrated the UFC’s 25th Anniversary. The show certainly went out with a bang as Rodriguez knocked out Jung with an upwards elbow in the final second of the fight. “El Pantera” was down in the fight.

Rodriguez’s coach Israel Martinez recently appeared on “The MMA Hour.” While Martinez said one back-and-forth, bloody war can be good for a fighter’s career, he doesn’t want to see Rodriguez in another:

“We believe every fighter needs one of those. It’s one of those things you tell a young athlete, you tell a young fighter, even the older guys: You need to get your ass kicked to kinda be woken up a little bit, and you need to go through some dirty fights, some trenches. But you don’t need to do that every day. You don’t need to get punched in the head every day. And that’s one of those fights that we’re gonna have in our bag and we’re always going to be able to pull out all the things we’re learned from that, but there’s no way we want that type of fight again. Those things are deadly. Yair is beat up, and that’s going to be stuck in his head, good and bad, for the rest of his life. So we want to make sure that we take the positives over the negatives and move forward. But yeah, definitely, you know that — you don’t want to be getting hit in the head, you don’t want to get beat up every day, and those long five-round fights are good for the fans, but they’re not good for us. We want to try to [win] early.”

The win against Jung was pivotal for Rodriguez’s return to relevancy in the featherweight division. “El Pantera” hadn’t fought since May 2017. On top of that, he was released by the UFC for not taking fights with Ricardo Lamas and Zabit Magomedsharipov. With the performance he had at UFC Denver, it’s safe to say that Rodriguez isn’t in the doghouse anymore.