Reinier de Ridder has every reason to celebrate after his knockout win over Bo Nickal this past weekend at UFC Des Moines, but despite his victory, he feels no need to step on his opponent in defeat.
The former two-division ONE Champion put on a dominant performance to hand Nickal the first loss of his career, but he doesn’t buy the idea that the three-time National Champion wrestler somehow got exposed. Instead, de Ridder believes that he was the better man that night, and he offered Nickal some advice on how he should deal with the blowback from the loss.
“It’s always like that,” de Ridder told MMA Fighting on Monday. “There’s a lot of hype around him. To be honest, if he’s smart, he just puts his phone in another room for two days, and he just spends some time with his wife and kids. He’s going to enjoy some time at home, recover a little bit, turn his phone on again next week like nothing happened. Everybody forgets in a couple of days. He’ll be fine.”
At just 7-0 in his career, Nickal was already being touted as a future champion, and he didn’t exactly dissuade anybody from making that argument. Past comments about winning potential fights against top-ranked middleweights like Khamzat Chimaev started circulating almost immediately after Nickal got blasted with a body shot that stopped the fight and ended his undefeated run in the UFC.
For his part, de Ridder never felt that Nickal was looking past him or approached the fight with an overinflated ego, but he also knows how quickly a bad loss can humble somebody because it’s happened to him personally.
“The difference between being very confident and arrogant is very small,” de Ridder said. “I’ve been a victim of this in the past, maybe a little bit as well. I’m always confident in my abilities, but I’ve stepped over the line a little bit into arrogance as well. I don’t feel he was that arrogant coming into this fight all, to be honest. He was very humble. From what I’ve seen, he was very down-to-earth coming into this fight.
“It’s up to him now. I’ve been in this position. I’ve lost. I’ve lost terribly, like pretty much basically like this fight, I lost as well. Now it’s up to him to see if this can be a negative thing or a positive thing. He can make this into a positive thing. He can look at this as being a big lesson and something he’s going to grow [from] or he can look at this and say that it was a fluke and I just wasn’t myself that day and f*ck it. But I think if you see how far he’s already gotten in this game, how far he’s gone in wrestling, you can’t have a weak mindset. He’s a very strong guy. He’s a very strong individual, and I think he’s going to take some time off from planning a fight, and we’ll see him back in six months, and he’s going to tear through a lot of guys.”
He has so much confidence in Nickal’s abilities that de Ridder actually hopes that they get the chance to work together now that the fight between them is over.
“I would really like to work with this guy,” de Ridder said. “I would really like to work with him. Because of the skill set he brings, it would be awesome to train together. I don’t really know if me being a Kill Cliff guy now and him being [American Top Team] is going to work out, but maybe we can do it low-key and not tell anybody.”
Nickal might be down in the dumps right now but de Ridder absolutely expects him bounce back from this loss and come back even better than before.
“I’m just happy I got a chance to fight him now and not in three years,” de Ridder said. “In three years, he’s going to be a f*cking killer. He’s going to run through everybody.”
As far as his own career goes, de Ridder hopes that the win over Nickal vaults him forward into even bigger and better fights.
While Nickal wasn’t highly ranked, his name drew a lot of attention to the fight, and de Ridder just knocked him out inside two rounds. With this kind of dramatic win on his resume, de Ridder wants to parlay this performance into an even bigger fight when he returns to action later this year.
“That was the thing in my mind as well, going into the fight — he might not be ranked in the top five, but at least he’s a top-five name,” de Ridder said. “In America, everybody knows this guy. He’s highly touted; everybody expected the world from him.
“I’m hoping this really puts me up there to fight a guy like [Sean] Strickland, like I called out. So fingers crossed.”
