MMA legend & BJJ world champion BJ Penn is having a hard time leaving his fighting career. The 41 year old former 2 division UFC champion & BJJ world champion hasn’t won an MMA fight in 10 years, but he still doesn’t know about if he’s going to call it quits.
He was fired from the UFC late last year after he was knocked out in a street fight in Hawaii, so if he would fight again, it would be outside of the UFC.
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In a recent Instagram live session with coach Jason Parillo, Penn gave an insight into where he is at the moment:
“It takes a lot of work. It takes too much. Too much f*cking work. At this age, it just takes too much f*cking work. You never know what’s going to happen, but it takes so much work.”
“If I can get anything else going it would be nice. If I could get anything else going in life than just a fist fight, it would be nice. But it’s so fun and I love the process and all those things about it. Then you get in the gym and start doing good with active fighters and next thing you know you’re trying to fight and biting off more than you can chew. You might be, you might not be. But the process itself it’s a lot to just do a camp or whatever.”
“I guess when you have something to prove that’s when you can fight the best. It’s like, ‘Hey man, you already proved yourself.’ It’s not about proving myself, I just really like doing this. But you can’t go out and keep getting hurt. That just don’t make sense to anybody.”
Going back to Jiu-Jitsu?
Fond of competition, BJ can find the answer on the mats in his post-UFC career. as the first non-Brazilian to win a World Jiu-Jitsu Champion in 2000, he can once again wear the gi.
In an interview with tatame (in Portuguese) a few years ago, Penn said:
“There’s a chance, actually. Jiu-Jitsu is what I’ll do for the rest of my life, competing in something where I have no risk of brain injury, but once I decide I do not want to fight in the UFC. I want to make sure that my time in MMA is over. It is a matter of ‘timing’. When I’m sure that I will not fight in the UFC again, I’ll go back. “
In Jiu-Jitsu, Penn won the silver medal at the 1998 World Cup, and won bronze in the following year, as a lightweight. In 2000, three months after receiving his black belt from the hands of Andre Dede Pederneiras, the Hawaiian won the gold medal by beating Edson Diniz in the final.
