Dustin Poirier reflects the UFC career, life in Lafayette La | sport

Stubborn. Stubborn. A hard worker.

These were the words mixed martial artists and the Dustin Poirier from Louisiana, who described himself as a child in a moment of calm self -reflection in his house in Lafayette five days before entering the ultimate fighting championship in New Orleans in New Orleans.

They are also words that describe him as a professional fighter and UFC headliner during his 16-year career of triumph, defeats, doubts, courage and bloodshed as a professional fighter and UFC headliner.

In 2012, a 23-year-old Poirier spoke to a reporter after losing young against Chan Sung. He held back the tears bloody and exhausted.

“It is a big hit for me. “I will win or I will die in the cage. One of the two will happen.”

Then it was Poirier in 2021, vengeful and hellbent when he excluded Conor McGregor with a painful volley of blows and describes his name in UFC history. Later, in 2024, after his loss against Islam Makhachev on UFC 302, the crowd saw another, war -political Poirier.

“When I fight again, what do I fight for?” After the fight, he said to Joe Rogan in Octagon and took his breath away. “I don't know, I have a little girl I love and I have to see. I think it could be.”

It didn't take long for Poirier to replace these layers of doubts. His last fight before retirement will come against Max Holloway in the Smoothie King Center this weekend. In an interview, Poirier said that he knows exactly what he is fighting for.

“To try to achieve another victory to take the top …”, he said. “To put down the gloves and withdraw in Louisiana, where I trained and started fighting for the first time.”

“A way to redemption”

The spirit of a fighter has always lived in Poirier, even as a child who grew up in Lafayette.

Part of it is in his blood. Both his father and his grandfather were boxers. It also comes from the close -meshed, exhausting community in which he grew up and in which his mother drove a nursing home out of her house while he raised him and his two siblings.

Ultimately, he said, his community was a place where “people had to get their hands dirty and work to get everything they wanted”.

Poirier cannot see exactly at the moment he knew that he wanted to be a professional fighter. As a child, the fights brought him no rewards. Instead, it ended up in boot camp and detention centers, nobody could break his natural train to fight.

But finally it started to pay off in the right way. He became a professional in 2009 and quickly rose to the highest increases in sport. Poirier may have said it best in “Fightville”, a popular documentary from 2011 that followed him and other aspiring martial artists in Lafayette: “The fight has opened a way to redemption for me.”

Resilience in the mind, body, soul

Above all, Poirians showed fights that he had control over his future.

“I had no one who points to my finger, but myself, regardless of whether I did it well or bad,” he said during the last interview. “It was just me, I urged myself to get better.”

For a fighter, the spirit must be as resilient as body and soul. And the times when doubts about him were burdened, Poirier wrote to his wife Jolie that he always pulled him back into the right head space.

When Poirier was 18 years old and had no car, Jolie drove him to Texarkana, Texas for his first amateur fight. The couple, who had been together since the middle school, married in 2009 and bought his first house.

Although his young age could otherwise indicate this at that time, Poirier's first success of the success could not be quick.

While “Fightville” was shot, he not only drove to a delivery van and dragged windows, doors, trim and shape to customers to make rounds.

In one scene, Poirier refers to photos when he was 200 pounds and said that some did not even recognize him after training. But what many recognized, including his mother, was his transformation from a troubled boy to a determined fighter.

“He finally found what he was looking for all the time,” said his mother in the documentary. “I know that he has been waiting for his whole life to climb something up and put his hands in the air because he did best.”

When Poirier looks back on this ambitious child before his last fight and has only two things to say with a professional recording of 30 wins and 9 losses.

“Grind on. It will pay off.”

Life after retirement

Although he said that the fight will be his last on Saturday, Poirier is still difficult to imagine a life without a cage. He fights for the BMF Belt, a symbolic title that is awarded to the UFC fighter for their toughness. Then he will return to his house in Lafayette, where he and his wife have lived since 2016 to educate their daughter and prepare for the birth of her son.

The retired fighter said that he planned to stay in the Good Fight Foundation, a charity that he and Jolie founded in 2017 to support the causes in Lafayette. The non-profit organization collects money by auctioning memories from Poiriers UFC career.

He plans to further expand his business, such as the brand hot sauce, Poiriers Louisiana style, and consider to invest in additional residential properties.

And soon after the end of Poirier's fighting career, a restart of “Fightville” will be released.

Nevertheless, life will not feel that way when it lays down the gloves.

“Nothing will ever fill this emptiness,” said Poirier. “No matter how many shops I have, no matter how many things I am busy outside of it. I don't think that something will ever be the emptiness that I have prepared to prepare to fight a man in front of the world.”