Khalil Rountree is coming off one of the biggest wins of his professional MMA career, defeating kickboxing great Gokhan Saki by first round knockout at UFC 226.
The light heavyweight star isn’t just happy to get the win, but was also relived that everything went perfectly on that night.
“No, I think the fight went perfectly. I got to move around a little bit, find out how I felt. Everytime I step into that cage, its like ‘I remember what its like to be here again.’ For me to go out there and get a first round finish, it looks perfect. I got out of there safe, no injuries or anything like that. It can’t go any better than that,” says Rountree in an exclusive interview with Fightful’s James Lynch.
Rountree has now picked up three wins under the UFC banner, but the victory over Saki was his first win on a UFC pay-per-view main card.
There has been a lot of criticism surrounding the post-fight altercation between Daniel Cormier and Brock Lesnar at UFC 226, but Rountree mostly sees the altercation as a good thing.
“My jaw dropped, just by how it went about. I don’t mind that DC’s fighting Brock Lesnar, I understand that its a huge fight. So many people are going to tune into it, everybody wants to see it happen. I didn’t get to like ‘oh WWE’ about it, that’s the part of the business that I do understand and I’m trying to grow at because I realized that you gotta have some type of charisma or something to really see a fight…to get people to watch. So for me, I was like ‘OK, I see what they’re doing.’ That was kind of my thing, I see what they’re doing. Am I a fan of it? No, not really. I think there are different ways to go about it, we’re promoting mixed martial arts…you get me? If we’re just promoting fighting and entertainment, then cool. I think it was like nail on the head, there is no better way of promoting entertainment and fighting than having two guys go after it in the cage after a fight,” says Rountree.
Lesnar and Cormier are supposed to meet for the UFC Heavyweight Title sometime in 2019, its unknown if Rountree will get a spot on that card.
