Former UFC Champion Johny Hendricks Announces Retirement From MMA

Former UFC Welterweight champion Johny Hendricks retires from MMA.

The 34-year-old Hendricks, with a professional record of 18-8, announced his retirement during a recent appearance on MMAJunkie Radio. ‘Bigg Rigg’ said he is done with MMA and putting his focus back on coaching.

“I’m done. I’m retiring,” Hendricks said, “I am getting out of the MMA world. I’ve been thinking about this long and hard for a while. I’m gonna get back to my roots and I’m going to start coaching at All Saints. I coached a little bit of high school last year at Oak Ridge, but I’m making the move over to All Saints. I’m going to start coaching there, start doing those kinds of things.

“One of the things that’s nice is these last seven months, being home, spending time with the kids, not worrying about myself, what I need to do,” Hendricks added. “I was walking around at 200 for three weeks, I was just living the life, I go, ‘Do we really want to do this?’ I know that I’m more happy to do it, but do we want to do this? Do we want to go through the grind that I used to do. Be gone for long periods of time, put my family second and do those kinds of things? Right now I can’t say that.”

Hendricks rough patch starts when he lost a narrow split decision to Georges St-Piere at UFC 167, who then went on a self-imposed hiatus from the sport. Jonhy had a chance to win the vacated UFC welterweight title, which he claimed after scoring a decision win over Robbie Lawler at UFC 171. Since then,“Bigg Rigg” has won just two of his last eight fights, including a failed move to middleweight division that has seen him knocked out in his last two contests.

Johny missed weight in back-to-back fights against Kelvin Gastelum and Neil Magny, accelerating his move up to middleweight, where he failed to make weight against Tim Boetsch.

As far as Hendricks is concerned, he is done for good and has no plan of coming back to sports unless a lucrative payday being floated in his direction.

We wish the best of luck to a two-time NCAA Division-I wrestling champion in his future endeavors.

Published on June 27, 2018 at 12:00 am
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