Carlos Ulberg has visualised winning a UFC title many times – and when he does, his mind goes back to his upbringing.<\/p>\n
The 35-year-old has lived a diverse life, going from rugby league player to reality TV star to UFC title challenger, but before all that he was a foster child.<\/p>\n
Ulberg moved between foster homes in New Zealand, living with dozens of different families, between the ages of about four and 13.<\/p>\n
Ulberg says there were some “good homes” and some “not so good homes”, while other times he would get “beaten up every day” by the other foster children – but the experience shaped him.<\/p>\n
“That’s what has created me into this space that I am now and it’s a good thing. That’s what’s brought the best out of me,” Ulberg tells BBC Sport.<\/p>\n
“I grew out of that kind of feel-sorry-for-yourself mentality and started to just push forward, and that’s what built a resilience in me.”<\/p>\n
At UFC 327 in Miami’s Kaseya Centre on Saturday, Ulberg faces former champion Jiri Prochazka for the vacant light-heavyweight title after Alex Pereira dropped the belt to move up to heavyweight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Carlos Ulberg has visualised winning a UFC title many times – and when he does, his mind goes…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":374553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[111,139,69,213],"class_list":{"0":"post-374552","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-sports","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-newzealand","10":"tag-nz","11":"tag-sports"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374552","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=374552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/374552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/374553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=374552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=374552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=374552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}