Coach Mike Winkeljohn says Condit and Lawler ‘Fight of the Night’ not worth $50,000 for brain damage

It was just the second day of 2016 and fight fans were given a title fight for the ages. Robbie Lawler and Carlos Condit fought a grueling 5-round fight that had a lot of controversy with Lawler taking the split-decision win.

Mike Winklejohn, coach of Condit at JacksonWink MMA recently spoke with Submission Radio on the fight, and the consequences of such a battle (transcribed by Mixed Martial Arts):

Why Coach Wink thought Carlos Condit won the much-debated third round against Robbie Lawler.

“Oh definitely the number of strikes, the number of times he’s kicking him. Carlos was getting a lot of damage done with his front kicks and his leg kicks and his straight-type of kicks to the legs, and those were taking a toll on Robbie. They were hurting Robbie throughout the fight. So I thought it was definitely the volume thing that was making a big difference in the fight.”

If Carlos deserves a rematch against Lawler.

“Yes. No doubt about it. It was one of the best fights of all time and I think everybody wants to see it. I think that’s it. I have not spoken to Carlos about what he wants to do, I just gave him a little bit of time off. I’m just checking to make sure he’s feeling ok, but I definitely think Carlos deserves a rematch. Who wouldn’t them to rematch? It’d be incredible.”

If Carlos spoke to Wink about retirement before going into UFC 195.

“No, it wouldn’t have shocked me in the slightest. You know what, Carlos is very, very smart about the game and about taking damage to your head especially, as well as your whole body and living a good life afterwards. We’ve always had that conversation that we wanna…we’d like to not get hit as much in our fights. We don’t want to win ‘fight of the night’. That happened to be fight of the night, which totally sucks, because there is a lot of brain damage going on, and it’s definitely not worth fifty thousand dollars for that individual. Fans love it, everybody else loves it, but you pay for it. Hopefully you don’t, but you might be paying for that later in life. But we’ve had that conversation many times before, where Carlos has thought, you know, ‘I’d like to get out of this and go forward in my life and be there for my family’. He’s real smart that way. He understands there’s more important things in life than just punching other people in the face.”