Johnny Walker was ready for a fresh start with his fight booked at UFC 311 after he relocated from Ireland to Las Vegas and found a new home at Xtreme Couture.
Unfortunately his plans went awry after suffering an injury that forced him out of his scheduled fight against Bogdan Guskov. It was a difficult situation for Walker to navigate, especially given his excitement to show off his improvements after working with his new team under the tutelage of head coach Eric Nicksick.
“It just happened,” Walker told MMA Fighting about the injury. “I think I was too skinny. I was trying to go one kilo lower this time to facilitate my [weight cut] because I’m very big for this division. It’s not hard. I face nothing hard in life. It’s just a lot of weight that I have to cut. I’m already skinny, very lean. Maybe I was too skinny and I was rolling, I felt my ribs doing something. I was like wait, wait, wait, stop, stop, stop! I think something happened to my ribs.
“Then I stood up and I moved around and [I said] let’s go, because I was sweating, my blood was warm, I didn’t feel much. I started [moving], I was punching a little bit and then he put me on the fence, held me a little bit and I was moving around. Wait, wait, stop stop! I have to check this because I think something’s wrong. Then I did the MRI the other day, they just pulled me out of the fight because they probably saw it was worse for me and I probably couldn’t fight. Because ribs are very complicated. It takes four to six weeks to heal. I would push the fight and wait but they took the decision from me.”
As much as he still wanted to compete, Walker says the UFC made the final call to pull him from the fight to allow him time to recover.
“It was on the bone, it was the cartilage,” Walker said about his rib injury with plans to document his recovery on his OnlyFans page. “Cartilage takes four to six weeks to heal. I want to focus on my recovery now because I don’t want to start another camp with any limitations. I need to be very careful now and recover but it’s hard to sit down and recover..
“Because we want to move, we want to fight, we want to train. I want to do my best that I can in the situation that I am now because I want to keep my conditioning because I’m in f*cking great condition. I don’t want to lose that.”
Walker was obviously disappointed with the setback but he’s been very happy with his decision to relocate to Las Vegas after spending the past few years training under coach John Kavanagh at his SBG facility in Ireland.
While he was very appreciative of the time he spent working at the Irish gym, Walker admits there was one key piece of the puzzle missing that was just holding him back.
“I had very good training, coaching in Ireland with John Kavanagh,” Walker said. “He improved my game, he helped me so much but I did not have big guys there like a lot of training partners. When I fought [Volkan] Oezdemir, I was doing my best and was incapable of doing a really good training camp but I was sparring a lot of big guys, heavy guys because I have boxer guys there but not high level MMA guys.
“I just have one training partner was Will Fleury. He fights in Oktagon, he’s the champ in Oktagon now. He’s really good but sometimes he has a fight, he has to rest injuries, whatever, so I just had him. I had to fly in guys from other countries. I did not have high level guys to train everyday. I was training a lot in the boxing ring with boxer guys so you see the result of the fight in the octagon against Oezdemir.”
Walker’s night ended early when he faced Volkan Oezdemir this past June after he suffered a brutal first-round knockout, which served as his second loss in a row overall.
It was that moment in particular that forced Walker to realize he wasn’t getting everything he needed in Ireland and moving to Las Vegas was necessary as he moved forward in his career.
“I did this to myself. I gave a gift to Oezdemir,” Walker said. “Not taking the victory away from him, he’s a good fighter but I made it easy for him to win to win the fight because I was doing a lot of boxing in the boxing ring to train. Because I did not have high level MMA guys there to train [with]. I just had one or two there sometimes.”
As much as he appreciates the time Kavanagh and the other coaches gave to him over the past few years, Walker realized that he had to make a change if he was going to get back on track with hopes of moving up the light heavyweight ranks.
At Xtreme Couture, Walker says there are no shortage of great training partners around his size not to mention a world-class coaching staff plus he also has the benefit of living close to the UFC Performance Institute. In the end, Walker admits the decision to move from Ireland to Las Vegas just had to happen.
“I’m wasting my career if I’m not doing my best everyday,” Walker said. “I have to be a little bit selfish and think I can’t fight forever, I need to do my best. I moved here to Vegas because I have the UFC [Performance Institute]. I have strength and conditioning, I have nutrition, physical therapy, recovery and I’m training now at Xtreme Couture with coach Erik [Nicksick].
