Ronaldo Souza Admits He Almost Retired After Last Loss
Ronaldo “Jacare” Souza is headlining UFC On Fox 27 later this month, facing Derek Brunson in a rematch.
Souza is coming off of a loss to UFC Middleweight Champion Robert Whittaker at UFC On Fox 24, which caused the Brazilian to consider retirement after that defeat and the surgery that followed shortly after the bout.
”I thought about stop fighting because it was a long surgery,” Souza told MMA Fighting. “When I came back to training, seven months later, my trainer asked me to run for 10 minutes, and I called him back, ‘Brother, I can’t even run for five minutes, it hurts so bad and I’m tired’ [laughs]. It was complicated for me to return. I was thinking about retirement. It was really hard. I thought about it for a while, it was too complicated. I had to undergo surgery many times. I had never suffered any injury throughout my career, was always healthy, and all of a sudden I had a lot of injuries. I said, ‘Man, I don’t want to go to the surgery table and go through all this again.’”
Jacare is back and action and fighting an opponent that he originally defeated by knockout in their Strikeforce days.
While Brunson is looking for revenge at UFC On Fox 27, a healed Souza just wants to annihilate his opponent once more.
”He’s still saying the bunch of crap about me he said six years ago, and I will go there and annihilate him,” Souza said. “That’s the plan. It hasn’t changed anything.”
UFC On Fox 27 takes place on Saturday, January 27 from the Spectrum Center in Charlotte, North Carolina with Ronaldo Souza and Derek Brunson headlining. Fightful is providing live coverage of the event, which airs live on Fox.
