Bobby Lashley couldn’t quite find the balance.
WWE Champion Bobby Lashley was a decorated Mixed Martial Arts fighter following his original departure from WWE where he compiled a 15-2 record, including an unblemished 5-0 record when competing in the Connecticut-based promotion, Bellator MMA.
Lashley recently appeared on The MMA Hour with top combat sports journalist Ariel Helwani and discussed not being able to find the balance between family life and his training schedule which led to him retiring from in-ring competition in 2016.
“I didn’t ever have an actual training camp…never. That’s one thing, when I was like ‘can we run for the title?’, I wanted to run for the title but I’m a single father, so I’d always have my kids and what I was doing was I would run down to [Josh] Barnett and I’d get some work done with American Top Team and I’d be there for a week and then I’d have to run home and be with my kids. Then I’d go back and get some sparring in here and there and Josh would come up there with me and do some work with me. So, my camps were so broken and as a fighter, once you start moving up the levels, you really have to have a game plan, you have to have a team, you have to get everything together.
“Some of the other people like Brock — and I don’t take anything away from Brock for this, it’s actually jealousy — when Brock was fighting he had a gym built right beside his house, guys flew out to him and his coaches flew out to him. He’d go have breakfast then go right outside his house and train and then just go inside to his family. In Denver, I didn’t really have a team that I could work with full-time at that time, so I was traveling down to American Top Team and go back-and-forth and I didn’t see how I could make that better. I built a gym, an American Top Team gym in Denver and I thought maybe I could bring people in but there was a lot of expenses I was talking on and now I’m running a gym and selling my cardio kickboxing class and trying to push my CrossFit courses and it was pulling me away further from what I was trying to accomplish.
“I knew if I wanted to do this full-time, get into the UFC and make a run or stay in Bellator and make the run for the title, I gotta get it all together and it was challenging and I couldn’t find a way to do it and I didn’t wanna take time away from my kids. In a different world, if I could’ve moved to San Jose full-time and could’ve trained with Cain [Velasquez] and [Daniel] Cormier full-time, it would’ve been a whole different ball game.”
Back in the WWE world, Lashley is set to defend his WWE Title inside of the Elimination Chamber at the namesake event on 2/18 against Brock Lesnar, Seth Rollins, AJ Styles, Austin Theory and Riddle.
Related: Bobby Lashley Wants Rematch Against Brock Lesnar Inside Of WWE’s Fight Pit
If you use this transcript, credit WrestleZone and link back to this post.
