It was a between-rounds moment that seemed destined to go viral, if only because of how uncommonly candid it was. After the second round of his WBC interim flyweight title fight against Olympic gold medalist Galal Yafai in December, former flyweight champ Sunny Edwards told his cornerman exactly how he was feeling.
“Can I be real, Chris?” Edwards said to his cornerman, Chris Williams. “I don’t want to be here.”
As he would later reveal, Edwards knew going into the fight that he planned to retire afterward — win, lose or draw. Injuries had been piling up. His 12 years as a pro had taken their toll. And so maybe in that moment, early in a fight that wasn’t going his way, he’d already gone elsewhere in his mind.
His cornerman, however, wasn’t having it. Williams told him to stop feeling sorry for himself, bite down on his mouthpiece and get back out there. Edwards did exactly that before ultimately being stopped in the sixth round. After the fight, Williams explained his thinking in allowing his fighter not only to continue after that surprising admission, but essentially demanding it.
“Obviously, if he had been really hurt I would have had to make a decision,” Williams said in an interview later. “But I didn’t think he was really that hurt. He just wasn’t getting his way. It wasn’t going to plan. I think we were both expecting it to go to plan, and when it didn’t he just felt a little sorry for himself and wanted to be out of there.”
Talk to the coaches who work corners on fight night and they’ll tell you it can be a fine line to walk. How do you know when a fighter needs you to intervene and when he just needs a pep talk?
In MMA, coaches have often been notoriously reluctant to throw in the towel. A famous example came in 2020, when Robert Drysdale initially refused to stop a UFC bout even after his fighter, Max Rohskopf asked him several times to “call it” between rounds.
Drysdale took a lot of criticism from fans who thought he’d failed to protect his fighter. The Nevada State Athletic Commission said it would investigate the incident, though Rohskopf later defended Drysdale’s decision, saying his coach “did the right thing.”
Eric Nicksick, who wasn’t in the corner that night but knew Rohskopf well from working with him at the Xtreme Couture gym in Las Vegas, agreed. What makes all the difference, he said, is knowing your own fighter well enough to tell the difference between a low moment and a cause for real concern.
“Because I know Max, I know he suffers from anxiety and depression and other things like that,” Nicksick said. “I could empathize with Robert there, because I know sometimes that’s what Max needs, is someone to tell him, ‘Hey, you can do this.’ That’s one of the things you have a coach for, is to pick you up when you need it.”
But Nicksick also made the opposite decision in a 2018 fight with tremendous stakes, calling off a PFL title fight with $1 million on the line after he saw his fighter, Vinny Magalhaes, battered by Sean O’Connell.
That decision, he said, was informed by more than just what he saw in the cage that night. It also underscored just how important it is for coaches to know the full story with each of their fighters, since no two are exactly are alike and each bout is its own unique situation.
“I just knew in my heart that I had to get him out of there,” Nicksick said. “I knew what was going on with Vinny. I knew he’d suffered an injury in training camp. I had that personal knowledge of what the situation was. I’m a big body language guy, and I could see he was just totally dejected. It didn’t matter if it was for $1 million. It’s one thing if you’re just getting your ass kicked and you need someone to tell you, ‘Hey, you can do better.’ But when you know your fighter, you know when they really need you to stop it.”
That sentiment was echoed by Din Thomas, a coach and former UFC fighter who gets the chance to observe a lot of different approaches to corner work in his role as a UFC commentator. He’s seen coaches try, with varying degrees of success, to talk their fighters off the stool many times.
“Oftentimes, fighters are lying to themselves,” Thomas said. “They say they’re really excited, they want to fight, but they really don’t. Some of those guys, once they get in the fight, they overcome it and they’re good to go. But some people can’t do that, and then you need to get them out of there.”
It didn’t matter if it was for $1 million. It’s one thing if you’re just getting your ass kicked and you need someone to tell you, ‘Hey, you can do better.’ But when you know your fighter, you know when they really need you to stop it.Eric Nicksick
But Thomas also noted that one role of a coach is to help fighters become the best versions of themselves. Sometimes that might mean preserving their health so they can fight another day. But just as often it might mean stopping them from quitting on themselves and making a decision in the heat of battle that they’ll regret later on.
“A good example is Raquel Pennington in that [UFC women’s bantamweight title] fight with Amanda Nunes [in 2018],” Thomas said. “I sided with the coaches on that one, because just the little bit that I know of Raquel, she wouldn’t have wanted that. I think that was a moment where the emotion got to her and it got away from her, but she wouldn’t have wanted her coaches to pull her out of that. And that was a situation where I go, all right, you can talk her back into it. You can try to put some courage back into your fighter. Even if, in a lot of other situations, it might not be the thing to do.”
Javier Mendez, who coaches UFC lightweight champion Islam Makhachev among others at the American Kickboxing Academy in San Jose, California, noted that the importance of having a personal relationship with your fighter goes beyond knowing when to stop a fight. It informs the entire job of a cornerman, he said, in both good times and bad.
“People don’t all respond the same,” Mendez said. “If I yell at one person to get him motivated between rounds, it might work. But the next guy might just look at me like, ‘How is that supposed to help?’ As a coach, it’s your job to figure out who they are and what works for them.”
As Thomas pointed out, when all else fails, cornermen also have another tool at their disposal: lying.
If your fighter has just spent the last five minutes being pummeled to the brink of unconsciousness, tell him his opponent is clearly exhausted after all that punching. Tell him he just took the other guy’s best shots and he’s still here. Now it’s his turn. It’s all about to change in this next round.
“If you can get them to believe that, they might go out and perform better,” Thomas said. “That might give them confidence. Because really, being a good cornerman is just about being an effective communicator. There’s only so much technical advice you can really give someone between rounds. It doesn’t matter what you know if you can’t communicate it to your fighter. If lying to you gives you faith that you can still do damage out there, that’s what a good corner will do.”
