Neil Magny details training with “real deal” Khamzat Chimaev: “I f****d around and found out’
Neil Magny was vocal in wanting to fight Khamzat Chimaev, but it never came to fruition.
Magny and Chimaev agreed to fight one another on social media and for a while, it looked like the fight would happen. But, after it didn’t and both went their separate ways, Magny and Chimaev ended up training with one another and after the training session, Magny realized the Swede is the real deal.
“We had the opportunity to train in New York and the guy is definitely the real deal,” Magny said on The MMA Hour. “The best way I can explain it is like, I f***** around and found out. Khamzat is definitely the real deal. I went in there thinking, ‘Oh, here’s this sweet little wolf that I can train with in jiu-jitsu,’ and then things got real, real fast. There’s more hats to the guy, more so realizing, damn, this guy is actually the real deal. He’s not a fighter or fight I can take lightly at all. If I’m being honest, had I got that fight early on, I might have set myself up for failure, looking past him a little bit.”
When the two began training, Magny thought it would be a light grappling match but that was not the case. He says Khamzat Chimaev slammed him and the two went at it, and later on, a video came out of the training session.
Neil Magny admits Khamzat Chimaev got the better of him, but he says it is training at the end of the day. But, he is thankful for the training as he says it helped show him what he needed to work on.
“There’s a video out there so I can’t even deny it, he definitely got the best of me that training session,” Magny said. “Like I said, I f***** around and found out, and I definitely found out the hard way. ‘Oh yeah, sweet little wolf, here we go, we’re just playing around,’ and that wolf definitely bit, and I was like, ‘Oh crap, I was not expecting that.’ At the end of the day, I could give make excuses for it. ‘Oh, I wasn’t giving it my all, maybe it was this, maybe the fact that he was bigger,’ I could give you a thousand reasons why that training session didn’t go in my favor, but at the end of the day, it didn’t, and that kind of gave me a dose of reality. Alright, you got some s*** to work on.
“I’ll never be one of those guys to sit there and be like, ‘Oh, my opponent got lucky, this happened,’ or blame [anything],” Magny concluded. “I’m just not going to make an excuse for it. He definitely got the best of me that day, but I know that’s not the end of it. I know I have a lot more in me than what I showed that day and it’s just up to me to go out there and prove it.”
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