Bryce Mitchell made his bantamweight debut on Saturday night in Abu Dhabi, defeating Said Nurmagomedov via unanimous decision (highlights here).
Following the win, he posted a funny video on his socials — a take on Islam Makhachev’s famous “Send two years Dagestan and forget” joke.
“Send him to Arkansas, two to three years, and forget,” Mitchell said with a sly smile.
But during the UFC on ABC post-fight press conference, “Thug Nasty” was honest about how hard he had to fight to dig out a win against the tough Said Nurmagomedov.
“Good thing is if you get kneed in the face, a lot of times, you don’t feel it,” he said of the first round knee that almost finished him early (video via MMA Junkie). “A lot of times, you don’t even remember it. Yeah, somebody told me he kneed me. I believe you. I just I wasn’t there for it.”
“I knew it was gonna be hard, but I didn’t think it’s gonna be that hard,” he said later. “I’ll be honest, he’s tougher than I thought. Everything on my body hurts. Like, everything … I wish it would have been more exciting for the fans, but I was just fighting for my life. Like, I really was praying during the fight. ‘Jesus, just keep me alive,’ because the fight felt like death.”
“I remember fighting for air. I remember getting hit and seeing lights, and I remember my coaches telling me between rounds, ‘You can do this. You can do this, just dig.’”
“It was a really, really hard fight, and if you ever get in one of those, I just recommend you pray because that’s literally what I was doing. I mean, I wasn’t figuratively. I was literally praying, ‘Jesus, please just keep me alive.’ And I was fighting with all my strength and afterwards I was overheated. Like, I could barely move. I was so hot. It was hard to breathe after the fight.”
“I can’t think of a time I’ve been in more pain after the fight,” he concluded. “I mean, damn. My head hurts. My feet hurt. My hands hurt. My arms hurt. Everything was just hurt. My stomach’s hurting. I was just in a lot of pain. It wasn’t a good time in there.”
That being said, Mitchell is open to fighting another Nurmagomedov in his next fight if the UFC is interested: No. 2 ranked Umar Nurmagomedov.
“I think that’d be a pretty damn good fight, brother,” Mitchell said. “And, hell, why not? I already fought one of them. Let’s just fight all the Nurmagomedovs that there is, dude. Let’s just do this thing. Let’s do the Nurmagomedovs versus the Mitchells, dude. And the sad thing is there’s only one Mitchell, so I have to fight them all.”
This story originally appeared on MMA Mania
