It’s not likely you will ever see Ben Askren riverdancing up on stage in his boxer briefs at some MTV spring break beach party because Ben Askren doesn’t want to put on a show. All Ben Askren wants to do is win. For Ben, anything other than winning is just preposterous loser talk. On a recent interview he did on Sherdog Radio, he was asked about his opinion on Eddie Alvarez not finishing off Pat Curran at Bellator 39 and he had this to say about fighters that get in the cage to put on a show:
“I think people like that are losers because, in my mind, a fight’s about winning, not about putting on a show. We’re not singers, we’re not actors, we are Mixed Martial Artists or fighters or athletes, whichever way you wanna do it and that’s about winning. I mean, and when you consider it consider this point from an athlete’s perspective. So, a championship fight’s 25 minutes. That’s a long fricking time to fight. I’ve done a lot of hard things in my life and that’s one of the hardest. 25 minutes is a long time to fight. When you consider, if you go out there and say you go out like a sprint pace, like you go hard and Eddie Alvarez went to take his head off in the first two minutes, he might have gassed out in two minutes and lost the fight. That would have been so stupid and, so, I mean when you’re fighting for 25 minutes, every fan and their mother can talk shit about this and that and don’t finish fights. Well, why don’t they get in there and fight for 25 minutes? That’s a long time. And you got to win before you show. I mean, people that show on top of winning, say Anderson Silva, that dude now he’s a showman but he’s also won, what, 13 fights in a row? So, obviously, he can do it. And there’s people like Leonard Garcia who goes out and puts on a show but he’s like 3-5 in his last 8 fights. Like, c’mon dude.”
I bet when Ben Askren wakes up in the morning his alarm clock is programmed to repeatedly play the hook to that annoying and overplayed DJ Khaled song, “All I do is Win”. He probably grinds his teeth and wants to punch babies whenever he hears someone say “winning isn’t everything.” When Ben Askren’s Mom makes him a bowl of Alphabits cereal for breakfast he demands that only the letters “W-I-N” go into his bowl. I am sure Ben Askren’s new favorite celebrity quote is Charlie Sheen’s “Winning!” and his favorite TV commercial is the Direct TV one with the Russian “I am Epic Win” guy. I’m guessing right about now is probably a good time to press the stop button on this article before it becomes some ridiculous neverending tangent of annoying ‘win’ quips. [source]
