Joaquin Buckley was ahead of the curve, but now he\u2019s putting things into action before one of the most pivotal fights of his career.<\/p>\n
Buckley faces Mike Malott in the main event of UFC Edmonton this Saturday in the promotion\u2019s return to Canada. Buckley enters the bout on a two-fight skid and looks to get back on track, and is doing so with a bit more of a presence on social media.<\/p>\n
\u201cNew Mansa\u201d recently dropped a clip of a video on Instagram of him coaching up the \u201cHerb Dean drill. While Buckley was happy to see referees during Saturday\u2019s UFC Vegas 122 card take a couple of points away, he feels more needs to be done.<\/p>\n
\u201cI think it was just time to mention it, and plus, it\u2019s a great, great drill, by the way,\u201d Buckley told MMA Fighting. \u201cSo if you\u2019re doing the drill, you can have multiple people or you can have just one or two guys, but the drill is to go back and forth. So once somebody gets in the bag pretty good, you try your best to get them off them, but you try your best to stay on the bag as well. It\u2019s actually a fun drill. I\u2019m not gonna lie. \u2026<\/p>\n
\u201c[As far as Herb Dean and other refs go] I think it\u2019s still some things that can change for sure, but I would just have to say, \u2018What took so long?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
A little over three years ago, as he was trying to get his UFC career further off the ground and move the needle, Buckley was seen at UFC Jacksonville in June 2023 shooting fun content with fans outside of the arena \u2014 even trying to sneak into the media entrance for the event. That footage was never released.<\/p>\n
\u201cI didn\u2019t trust myself, you know what I mean?,\u201d Buckley said. \u201cI wasn\u2019t confident within myself at the time of what I was doing and really trying to figure it out. I didn\u2019t have a team at the time, like I didn\u2019t have people like to really post it for me and stuff like that. You got a group of people that usually helps out with some of these guys that do it now and I didn\u2019t have that at the time. It was really just solo dolo, and I just wanted it to catch and be honest with you, I still got those [old] footages that I can still pull out, which is dope.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut I just have to say that I trust myself now. I believe in myself now. I\u2019m not talking about no cage stuff, I\u2019m talking about really just, authentically, giving my real personality out there to the world and really showing people who I am as an individual. And really, I mean, shoot man, I\u2019m just a dude that loves to fight, love martial arts, and I thought about the best way to kind of, I guess, promote myself is through fighting alone. Fighting alone it\u2019s just as easy as it gets, and I should\u2019ve been doing this, like you said, years ago as I was doing.\u201d<\/p>\n
After putting himself in title contention following a win over Colby Covington in the main event of UFC Tampa in December 2024, Buckley dropped back-to-back decisions to Kamaru Usman and Sean Brady.<\/p>\n
As he prepares for this big fight with Malott, Buckley finally made the decision to hop on the Kick streaming channel train, which is something he started just a few days ago.<\/p>\n
So why now, and not when he seemed ahead of the game years back?<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, no, no, that\u2019s deep \u2014 I always wanted things to be perfect,\u201d Buckley continues. \u201cLet me say it like that. It didn\u2019t look perfect to me, it didn\u2019t sound good to me, it didn\u2019t\u2026 whatever, so it was still me, obviously. But at the same time. I want it to be a certain type of way, but sometimes it ain\u2019t gotta be a certain type of way. You just gotta do it. Like, shit, we\u2019re just here right now, and people just listening to us. They don\u2019t care about all the aesthetics. I thought people cared about the aesthetics because, you know, I love cinema, cinema, right? I love movies, so it\u2019s like the aesthetics of the eye and like how the video needs to be shot.<\/p>\n
\u201cI thought about all those things and I was just like, it\u2019s not good enough. So, yeah, I played myself.\u201d<\/p>\n
The 32-year-old Buckley faces Malott, a winner of four straight including victories over Kevin Holland and the recently-retired Gilbert Burns at April\u2019s UFC Winnipeg card.<\/p>\n
The newest member of the Kick fighters says he watched the likes of Quinton \u201cRampage\u201d Jackson and King Green get their channels off the ground, and it inspired him, and showed proof of concept for his new channel.<\/p>\n
\u201cYeah, everybody doing their thing and like I said, no disrespect to them,\u201d Buckley explained. \u201cThey motivated me to do it, but I was like, if they can do it, I know I can, man. And I feel like I can have real purpose behind my content, not just making people laugh, [or] making people excited to see some cool drills or some workouts, but like actually change lives, man, with the content that I make, for real.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Joaquin Buckley was ahead of the curve, but now he\u2019s putting things into action before one of the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":929156,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,85,787,1396,14855],"class_list":["post-929155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-news","tag-videos"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=929155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/929155\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/929156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=929155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=929155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=929155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}