Joaquin Buckley is still reeling from his loss to Kamaru Usman in Atlanta.
Boasting a five-fight win streak, ‘New Mansa’ went into last Saturday’s headliner determined to get the biggest win of his career and put himself in pole position for a shot at the UFC welterweight championship. Needless to say, things did not go according to plan.
Instead, the ‘Nigerian Nightmare’ shut down Buckley’s offense with ease, scoring takedowns at will and landing a dominant unanimous decision victory.
After getting taken down four times and surrendering nearly 13 minutes of control time to Usman, Buckley was left “embarrassed” by his performance.
“Every round he took me down, kept me there,” Buckley said of Usman on his YouTube channel. “I couldn’t get back up to my feet. I’m looking at Mike Beltran, like, ‘Bro, stand us up at least one time, let me get back up to my feet.’ I’m not going to lie to y’all, I feel so embarrassed because of that loss.
“I feel so humiliated because of that loss. But at the same time, I’ve got to bow my head. Usman showed me who he was – truthfully, bro. I’ve really just got to understand that as many excuses that I can make about this fight, and why it didn’t go my way because X, Y, Z – it don’t matter. That night, it really showed it’s levels to this game.”
Joaquin Buckley was more focused on the future rather than the task at hand
Though he was unwilling to offer any excuses for his poor performance, Buckley has a pretty good idea of what went wrong.
“That was the first time I went into a fight, and I didn’t have that kill or be killed mentality, and that’s what kind of led to my downfall,” Buckley said. “I’m looking at pretty much the next move, and how big and how massive we’re going to become. This is our show-out moment, and it’s OK to have that type of mentality, but you’ve got to always remember it’s just another fight. With that being said, he had that key mentality. He was aware of the threat that was in front of him, I wasn’t, and I wasn’t aware of that threat until the fifth round, and that’s when I knew I had to turn it on.”
