Former Bellator lightweight tournament winner David Rickels is one of the best personalities in Bellator and is also one of the most successful as he has gone 10-3 in the promotion.
The highlight of his Bellator career to this point is winning the season eight lightweight tournament with victories over Lloyd Woodard, Jason Fischer, and Saad Awad.
On Friday night, he will be looking for his second straight win against John Alessio on the main card of Bellator 139 and he admitted to The MMA Report recently that he feels everything in his career is finally coming together.
“Everything is coming together. It’s a trifecta of a bunch of different things. My mind right and my body right,” Rickels explained. “Everything is coming together. I just started doing things a little bit differently like not blowing up to 220 pounds in between fight camps. I just got a taste of what it would like to get that belt and losing. Somewhere along that mix, it sent off a bomb in my head. How bad do you really want this David. From that point on, the Davi Ramos fight, I think I showed a lot of skills. Beat up a world jiu-jitsu champion and I am looking forward to show that I am the greatest Caveman that has ever existed.”
When you hear a fighter makes a comment like what Rickels said, you have to wonder what moment caused him to realize that he needed to make a change. That moment for Rickels came following his knockout defeat against Patricky Pitbull at Bellator 113 last year.
“It was not an exact moment. I can tell you what exact moment sparked it, which was being knocked out by Patricky Pitbull and restarting my brain,” he said. “That almost set me down a path of what the hell am I doing wrong. I have always had this feeling of what I am capable of is greatness and that is what I was not showing people. I could not understand what was going on. Looking back, I was not doing anything right in between fights. I was not being professional and I wasn’t really wanting to be a fighter. I really liked knocking people out and going to party afterwards. I kind of had to sit back after losing and do you really want this? Do you really want to pursue this as a professional fighter as a career and that is where I am at.”
If the lost did not happen to Pitbull the way it did, Rickels admitted that he would not have made the changes to his career that he has made. One of the changes he has made is not entering a fight camp at 205 pounds. He now enters camp at 180 pounds and he does not stop training between camps. He wants to improve his skills and plans to show them against Alessio in the co-main event of Bellator 139. He wants to make a statement and show everyone at Bellator that he is in the mix for a title shot in the lightweight division.
“John Alessio brings in a name and he went toe-to-toe with Will Brooks, Rickels stated. “He is the kind of guy who is just tough enough to usually just hang in there and make it a good fight with everybody. What I want to do is go in there and blow this f**king guy away. I want to make a staple out of it and let everyone know — I want people to say wow. I want them to say wow and look at Caveman. Look at how much he has changed. This guy really wants it.”