It's move on or move out time for many of the WEC fighters on the promotion's last two cards. The pressure begins Thursday night at WEC 52 in Las Vegas where some of the fighters are guaranteed spots in the UFC, but the rest of the guys are far from locks. Imagine that kind of pressure when you're only 19 years old? That's what bantamweight Michael McDonald is facing.
Is he mature enough to handle this? Listening to McDonald talk about his short time on Earth, he sounds like a grizzled veteran. From The Canadian Press:
"I feel like I went straight from a kid to an adult," [McDonald] explained. "At 14 years old I started teaching in classes, at 16 years old I had grown men saying I was their hero. And that's not something a normal kid has to deal with. It seems like it's a great big honour but when you're not ready for that kind of stuff, there's side effects of course."
McDonald is 10-1. His only loss came against a pretty accomplished veteran in Cole Escovedo (16-6). The 19-year-old said he'd lost his focus before the fight.
"And when I was growing up in high school, I never got to go to a high school football game. I've only went to one dance which was my prom. I did miss out on a lot of teenage things and I struggled with it for a long time. And it kind of started adding up. In my immaturity I forgot why I was doing it (fighting)." [...]
"Fighting just wasn't what I wanted to do any more. I felt like it was just a burden, that it had cut me off from so many things in my life. . . . That's when I took the Cole Escovedo fight and I just got mopped."
The painful loss got him thinking.
"After that I had to take a little bit of a break and get my head back about myself, and ask myself why am I doing this? Why am I fighting? And it's because I love to do it. As much as I wanted to be liked every normal kid, I knew every normal kid on the planet wanted to be me. I just had to suck it up and say 'You know what, this is the life I chose. It's time for me to stop moping around myself . . . God blessed me with these gifts and I need to use them, not say how much I wish he would have given me other things to be a normal person. He made me special, you know. I've got to go out and I've got to do what I need to do. I've got to stop being a kid, I've got to grow up.'
"And as soon as I did that, I got back on track and started on my winning ways again."
McDonald pulled things together and crushed Escovedo in the rematch.
McDonald is far from a finished product, but he's clearly ahead of the curve as a fighter. He'll get a chance to prove if he's truly a prodigy Thursday against 28-year-old Clint Godfrey on the undercard of WEC 52.
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