Paddy Pimblett has never been shy about putting it all out there, but coming to grips with his first UFC loss demanded something different. After surviving 25 wild minutes with Justin Gaethje at UFC 324, he sat down for a raw rewatch on his YouTube channel and let his thoughts spill out.
The Liverpool lightweight strolled into the January interim title fight unbeaten in the UFC and was eager to see what he could do against a pressure fighter like Gaethje. Over five rounds, Pimblett ate plenty of clean shots, kept swinging in the pocket, and ended up on the wrong side of three judges’ cards: 49-46, 49-46, 48-47.
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What he didn’t expect was the reaction that followed. “I feel like I’m getting more praise for this fight, for losing this fight, than all seven of me UFC wins. Crazy to me, you know what I mean? I lost at the end of the day, but people are still giving me big amounts of praise.”
He admits he gets a weird kick out of rewatching his scraps, even ones where he comes up short. “I always watch me fights back. Yeah, you do like watching your fights back. Even though I lost lad, it’s a very entertaining fight to watch.”
There’s no room for pre-fight excuses in his rundown. “I’ve got no excuses at all. Felt great going into the fight.” Gaethje’s relentless style forced Pimblett to dig deeper than ever, but the experience seems to have fired him up rather than shaken him. “I’ve said for years I want to have a war. I’d love to have more fights like that lad. Proper enjoyed it.”
He doesn’t hide from his shortcomings in the octagon, but for Pimblett, the loss just adds another layer: “You don’t lose, you learn, and I want to learn so much from this fight. I’ve never had to prove to myself how far I am. I’ve always said that no one’s knocking me out ’cause they’re not”.
A full 25 minutes trading with Gaethje boosted Pimblett’s confidence: “25 minutes of championship experience is going to do me nothing but good going forward. I know I can do 25 minutes fighting with someone like Justin Gaethje, and I can do it with anyone.”
Some figures around the fight inquired about his health after seeing the post-fight photos and swelling, but Pimblett shrugged it off like only he can. “I haven’t got any injuries. I haven’t got no people keep going on, ‘Oh, the damage he took, he’s going to have to take months off.’ I wanted to spar on Thursday, but Paul Ellis wouldn’t let me. I didn’t even have a concussion.”
Mixed martial arts is unforgiving, and rare is the fighter who walks through the UFC with a spotless record. For Pimblett, though, the defeat seems like rocket fuel for the next chapter: “You’ve got to lose and come back from it. And that’s what this fight is for me. You know, I’ve had to lose one to come back stronger and that’s what’s going to happen.”
Paddy pointed out the contradiction over one of his controversial wins, “I know how Jared Gordon felt, let’s put it that way.”
He closed things out with a grin and a shrug, showing why fans stick by him, win or lose: “I love fighting. That with Justin Gaethje, even though I lost and some of the rounds it took a bit of a beating, I thoroughly enjoyed that 25 minutes of throwing down.”
The lesson from Pimblett? It isn’t the zero in the loss column that makes a fighter, it’s what you do when the zero disappears.
