Dan Hooker has opened up on his second-round TKO loss to Benoit Saint Denis at UFC 325, admitting his preparation was not where it needed to be and vowing not to repeat the same mistakes.
Hooker, who also dropped his previous bout by quick submission to Arman Tsarukyan at UFC Fight Night 265, reflected on how the Saint Denis fight slipped away from him. "It's the same as Arman. You're giving these guys absolute fits on the feet – but yeah, I feel like I hurt BSD to the body, and he just put the pedal down, and I took it off," he said.
The lightweight was blunt about his recent training habits. "Like, I hadn't been putting the hours into the gym that I should have been doing, into the boring stuff, into my footwork, into my grappling, into my conditioning. I know exactly what I did wrong, and I was cheating the grind outside of training, outside of fight camp," Hooker admitted, adding that it "obviously shows head and shoulders when you get out there."
Hooker said the Saint Denis loss stung more than the defeat to Tsarukyan. "BSD, that one grinds my gears because losing to people that you're better than, that really f*cks me off. Even watching tape, I'm better than him. And losing because you're not putting the same hours into the gym as you should be putting. That didn't sit well with me. I'm not going to go out there and perform like that again. I'm not going to get beaten by people who are sh*t."
After Renato Moicano called him out following Moicano's submission win over Chris Duncan at UFC Fight Night 272, Hooker made his stance clear. "I'm better than Moicano is," he said, adding, "If I put my nose to the grindstone, and I get out there, tick the boxes I should be ticking when I'm in fight camp, and I get out there against Moicano, just straight cake walk. That's a cake walk."
