Fighting. Clawing. Scratching tooth and nail to get free. Gasping for air. Blurry vision. Eyes popping out of your head. The lights upstairs start to fade.
These are the symptoms middleweight Ultimate fighter Jesse Forbes experienced right before he was forced to tap out to Ryan Jensen at the MGM Grand Garden Arena in Las Vegas for UFC 114.
Sixty-six seconds was all it took for 12 weeks of blood, sweat and tears to turn into disappointment and regret.
Rewind that one minute and six seconds:
The fighters get their instructions, touch gloves, and the opening bell rings.
The fighters check each other out for about 20 seconds before Corona del Sol graduate Forbes sets up and lands a nasty straight left that floors Jensen.
Forbes rushes his grounded opponent and secures a dominant position, looking to do some damage. Jensen rolls over and Forbes tries to sink in a rear-naked choke, but misses.
A scramble occurs, and while Forbes shoots in for a takedown, Jensen catches him with a guillotine choke—and the rest is history.
“I made a big mistake,” Forbes says over lunch a week later. “I put my hand between his legs rather than on the outside to pass him, and he locked it up (for the guillotine). I should have gotten out of it—I mean, we do that stuff every day in practices; been there a thousand times. It’s no secret how to get out but, yeah, I tried to fight it, and there was no way around. He had it, and I was going to go night-night, so I tapped out.”
For his victory, Jensen won a hefty $65,000 “Submission of the Night” bonus. But Forbes didn’t go away empty handed: he walked off with an impressive $8,000, according to the Nevada State Athletic Commission.
It was the second of Forbes’ five-fight Ultimate Fighting Championship contract, and although his chances looked good at the opening, the outcome added up to a second consecutive setback, and he was released about a week after the contest.
“The only thing I can relate it to is having a relationship really go bad,” Forbes says of the loss and release. “Putting all your heart and soul into something, you know—you put all that work in and to come up short when you know in your mind you know 100-percent you never should have (lost)—it’s tough.
“You gotta deal with it and you gotta move on though.”
Forbes, who was picked up by the UFC after being discovered on the SPIKE TV reality series “The Ultimate Fighter,” will take his efforts back to the drawing board, having been told to get a couple wins under his belt in smaller shows.
Once that happens, he says, Forbes was told that another opportunity would surely arise for him in mixed martial arts equivalent to the major leagues.
“I think they like me,” Forbes says. “I think they know I have talent; they know I’m a skilled fighter—things just haven’t been going my way.
“They just told my management, go get three or four fights, get on a winning streak, and you’re welcome back. It’s a long process, I’ve been around for a while now, but I’m still only 25 so I just gotta keep on truckin’.”
Losses and disappointments are tough for everyone, let alone a fighter in an individual sport, and Forbes is no different. He trained twice a day for 12 weeks straight, made sacrifices, ate right, didn’t do the things normal 25-year-olds do like drink, party, stay up late at night—but that won’t change the outcome of his May 29 bout.
How do you put a loss like this one behind you? Get back to training? Take a vacation? Forget about it? Look at the positives from the fight?
“Whatever helps you sleep at night,” Forbes jokes. “A loss is a loss. I put all that hard work in and I really shouldn’t have lost anywhere, but I got caught. You gotta regroup, gotta stay strong and get back on that horse and ride. When you lose like that you can’t lose heart, you gotta get back up and and keep going, fall down seven times, get back up eight.”
Getting right back into the cage also helps heal the pain of losing, especially since Forbes came out of UFC 114 completely healthy with no injuries to account for. “As soon as possible,” he says without hesitation. “Get back on the winning side of things, you know, pick yourself back up. I’m going to try fight every month and get three fights and then go right back to it, so we’ll see what happens.” The All-American wrestler’s never-quit attitude is exactly what got him to this point, and despite back-to-back losses, he still holds an impressive mark of 13-and-5 overall.
Forbes plans on fighting in July, August and September to get back in action—and pad his resume with the hopes of getting back into the UFC.
Forbes was also named Tempe’s 2010 Volunteer of the Year for his work as a volunteer service aid with the Tempe Fire Department.
“You know if the fire department offers me a job, that will be my life for a while. and fighting will go on hold, or I’ll be done. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there, but right now I need to focus on fighting and getting back to the UFC, that’s my goal right now.”
The future for Forbes is uncertain right now. Going forward there will be lots of adversity that the CdS alum will have to overcome, but one thing is set in stone: he made it to “the show.”
He had the heart and guts and talent to put on those four-ounce gloves, walk that route to the octagon, and go mano-a-mano with another human being like a true warrior and no one can take that away from him.
“It was cool, I just wish I would have won,” Forbes says about the whole experience. “I put a lot of hard work into it and I have all the skill, the UFC fans haven’t been able to see what I can do, and that bothers me. So I gotta get back there, keep going, not lose heart on this.
“The experience was awesome though. It’s the biggest stage in the world for what I do and that’s where you wanna be, where I wanna be, so I’m gunna get back there.”
If all goes as planned, Forbes could be back in the octagon for the UFC before the end of the year or early 2011.
As for the main event at UFC 114, “Suga” Rashad Evans won a unanimous decision over Quentin “Rampage” Jackson, who stars in the recently released movie the “A-Team” as B.A. Baracus.
