After an decade-plus MMA career, former UFC Welterweight Champion Johny Hendricks has announced his retirement from the sport.
Hendricks isn’t just retiring as a pro MMA fighter, but he also plans on exiting the MMA world completely.
“I’m done. I’m retiring. I’m getting out of the MMA world,” Hendricks told MMA Junkie Radio. “I’ve been thinking about this long and hard for a while. I’m going to get back to my roots. I’m going to start coaching at All Saints. I coached a little bit of high school last year, but I’m going to make the move over to All Saints and start doing those things.”
The Oklahoma native captured the UFC Welterweight Title with a unanimous decision win over Robbie Lawler at UFC 171, but would lose the title in his first defense against Lawler via split decision at UFC 181.
A now retired Hendricks admits that his recent time away from the sport is what helped make the decision to retire.
“One of the things that’s nice is being home the last seven months, spending time with the kids, not worrying about what I needed to do,” Hendricks said. “I looked at my wife and said, ‘Do we really want to do this. I know I’m the one who has to do it, but do we want to do it? Do we want to go through the grind that I used to do, be gone for long periods of time, put my family second, do those kids of things?’ Right now, I can’t really say that. I made this decision two weeks ago, but I prayed about it and wanted to make sure I was going to be OK with it.”
During his decade-plus professional MMA career, a retired Hendricks defeated top names like the aforementioned Robbie Lawler, Jon Fitch, Josh Koscheck, Martin Kampmann, Carlos Condit, Matt Brown and Hector Lombard. Hendricks was last seen in action at UFC 217, where he suffered a second round TKO loss to Paulo Costa.
