diagnosed with a brain condition<\/a> that prevented athletic commissions to clear him. Lovato fought in the ring three and a half years later, improving to 11-0 in the sport with a quick submission over Taiga Iwasaki in Japan, and now flies to Tokyo for a grappling match with Giancarlo Silvio Bodoni at Saturday\u2019s ONE 173.<\/p>\n\u201cI\u2019m at a different phase in my life now being a father and getting into my 40s,\u201d Lovato told MMA Fighting. \u201cI was content and happy to have that one last fight, to say my goodbye, and getting to do in Japan just made it even more special. Everything\u2019s good. I don\u2019t feel like I have to fight or I\u2019m missing out on anything the way I did before, whenever it all kind of got taken away from me.<\/p>\n
\u201cI said my goodbye and I\u2019m good there. Still feeling good, still feeling like I\u2019m getting better, working my jiu-jitsu and my grappling and getting to face all these young guys has been a lot of fun. Hopefully this won\u2019t be the last and ONE wants to continue growing their grappling roster and we can get more opportunities for some big guys to do some grappling out there.\u201d<\/p>\n
Lovato signed a one-match deal with ONE to face Bodoni in August, but the contest was cancelled after ONE moved the card from Denver to Thailand. They\u2019re finally facing each other in Japan now, and Lovato hopes it\u2019s the start of a long relationship.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is just a one-time thing,\u201d Lovato said. \u201cBut hopefully I\u2019ll walk away with a beautiful victory and they want to have me back and maybe we can set up like a 205-pound title and really create a division on their grappling side.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m super excited. This feels like destiny,\u201d he continued. \u201cWe were supposed to face each other earlier in the summer in Denver and things got kind of pushed back and we didn\u2019t know what was going to happen. And then for it to fall into Tokyo just makes it even more exciting, more special. I got to do my last MMA fight there and I love the Japanese culture, the energy, the martial arts spirit.\u201d<\/p>\n
The jiu-jitsu world champion said he\u2019s always dreamed with the chance of competing in Japan after growing up watching the likes of Rickson Gracie strangle people in that part of the world, and Bellator\u2019s close ties to RIZIN was one of the reasons why he joined the promotion. Lovato won his six fights under the Bellator banner after being crowned Legacy FC middleweight champion, but never got his chance to fight there until 2022.<\/p>\n
\u201cNow here we are for grappling,\u201d Lovato said. \u201cI used to joke around with the ADCC people like, \u2018Hey, let\u2019s go to Japan. Let\u2019s do ADCC in Japan.\u2019 It never happened, but everything happens the way it\u2019s supposed to happen. That\u2019s one thing I\u2019ve learned in my life. Everything comes together at the right time, the right place, the way it\u2019s supposed to. If you stay around long enough, you\u2019ll be there to reap the benefit of it. I feel like that\u2019s totally what\u2019s happening now. The sport just growing, growing, growing. These opportunities to do grappling matches on big cards and be a part of these big events \u2014 ONE is huge and I\u2019m so excited and couldn\u2019t be more grateful for this opportunity.\u201d<\/p>\n
Bodoni was 12 years old when Lovato won his IBJJF world championship in 2007, and enters their match with an impressive feat of being a two-time ADCC gold medalist.<\/p>\n
\u201cI want to be able to look back on my career and say \u2014 which I already can \u2014, but I want to know that I faced everybody, all the best guys for multiple generations,\u201d Lovato said. \u201cAnd basically I\u2019ve been out there with all of them for the last two decades. This was one that I hadn\u2019t faced yet. I\u2019ve been watching him, I\u2019ve had students compete against him, I saw him come up and seeing his career unfold and do amazing things. I\u2019m a big fan of his style, he\u2019s very complete, very technical.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe has a timeless style. He\u2019s not like crazy scrambles or crazy athleticism, he\u2019s very precise, step by step, position by position. He can do it all and presents a lot of challenges. From studying him, from watching him, I\u2019ve learned some things and it\u2019s made me better. He\u2019s someone that now has a lot of attention so it\u2019s awesome to kind of represent for the old school and show them how the old lions do it and put my skills to the test against him.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The door is closed for Rafael Lovato Jr. to ever fight MMA again and he\u2019s content with the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283324,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[444],"tags":[49,48,641,701,638,1865,82],"class_list":{"0":"post-283323","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-mma","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-fighting","11":"tag-latest-news","12":"tag-mma","13":"tag-one-championship","14":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283323","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283323"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283323\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283324"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283323"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283323"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283323"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}