On December 14 in Tampa, Cub Swanson will look to make his 25th appearance inside the Octagon after debuting with the promotion all the way back in 2011. Having alternated wins and losses for the past few years, he’s looking to bounce back against Billy Quarantillo in a very fan-friendly match-up.
Swanson spoke in a recent interview with MMA Junkie about how he’s taking each fight one at a time at 41-years old. He announced that this bout will be the first of a newly-signed four-fight deal that he believes will take him up to the end of his career.
“It’s fight by fight but this would have been my last one so I told them I didn’t intend on fighting out of my contract and going to other places, I want to stay here. I think it’s fitting and so yeah, we did a new deal.”
When asked about his motivation to continue competing at this stage, Swanson said that though he now has to balance being a fighter with his other work commitments and family life, it’s his kids that inspire him to keep going. “Killer” Cub is focused on supporting his family but he also wants them to have memories that wouldn’t exist if he’d already hung up his gloves.
This motivation comes from a deep and emotional place for Swanson based on the experiences he had in regards to his late father. He opened up about this during the interview and explained how this has shaped the later stages of his UFC run.
“My father passed away when I was a baby so I grew up people telling me stories about my dad and I was always like, ‘Okay, thank you,’ but it’s like somebody I never met so it was a little strange. So I did all these cool things and then towards the end of my career I had kids and then they were babies and I’m like man, I don’t want them to hear stories about me and not remember it so then it became a motivation for me to want to do it long enough so they would remember and say, ‘Yeah, I remember my dad doing that, that’s pretty cool.’ So that became my motivation so it was really important for me.”
