It’s only 11am and already I have a regret. I know better than to open my yogurt with enthusiasm and furvor. One must peel back the foil vaccum sealed top of a container of yogurt with a steady, slow hand. Yogurt doesn’t like anyone just ripping off its foil top with careless abandon. It responds to such molestation by spewwing itself at your shirt and face like a scene from a Ron Jeremy movie. The day isn’t even half way over and already I’ve got regrets. Damn it.
Maybe I should look at the yogurt stain on my shirt like Melvin Guillard looks at his life experiences. From entering the UFC via The Ultimate Fighter at the ripe young age of 21 and experiencing the partying, drugs and limelight-Melvin is now moving forward and looking at all of his past indesicretions as life learnign experiences. He has no apologies or regrets and in this recent interview with Heavy.com he talks about what he’s learned thanks to these experiences and how he plans to keep moving forward and earn his way to a title fight.
“I wasn’t making great money, but I was making more money than the average kid in my neighborhood, people that were working 9-5s, and you get that high of “I feel like I’ve made it, I’m successful.” I wasn’t as successful then as I am now, but you get around the wrong crowds, the drugs, the partying, the wanting to be a rockstar.”
“I don’t regret anything I’ve done. I look back on what I’ve done and it’s made me stronger as a person, as a husband, and as a son to a mother. It’s made me stronger to my family.”
“All the Yes Men, all the people that are around when things were good – I found out the hard way. When I got suspended and I went to rehab, I lost a lot of people in my life that I thought were really, really genuine friends. I look back on those things now and I just think that was a learning experience.”
“My mom used to tell me all the time, `People are going to love you when things are good, but people are also going to hate you and not want to be around you when things go bad.’ That’s kind of how I approach everything now. I just keep my teammates, my coaches, my wife, and my family close, and I keep everybody else away from me.”
“I’m fighting my way to the title. I’m earning it inch-by-inch, fight-by-fight, so when I get my title shot and become world champion, nobody can ever question whether I deserve it or whether I earned it or did they just give it to me.”
“I’m going to perform to my best, and I want my performances to speak for themselves. Going into this fight next week, I’m approaching it like a title fight. I can’t sit there and worry about things that I can’t fix.”
“Every fight is a title fight. If I lose this fight, it pushes me back instead of forward. That’s how you have to look at it, and that’s what I do. I approach every fight like it’s a title fight.”
Sounds like Melvin is in a really great place mentally for his fight with Shane Roller this weekend at UFC 132. No regrets.[source]
