TUF 18 Alumni Louis Fisette returns to action for the first time since he appeared on the UFC’s reality show as he fights fellow Canadian Rick Pfeifer at Xcessive Force FC 5 in Grande Prairie, Alberta. Fisette was defeated twice on TUF in two very entertaining performances against finalist Davey Grant and TUF winner Chris Holdsworth. He is now looking at new possible training camps, dropping to Flyweight, and getting back into the UFC.
Michael Hutchinson: I want to start off with your experience on TUF. You had an amazing fight with Chris Holdsworth. Was that your toughest MMA fight to date?
Louis Fisette: “I would say either him or Davey Grant would be my toughest fight hands down. I think in the Holdsworth fight I took a lot less damage. A lot of people say I was winning that fight at the beginning. If you ask me, well, I don’t really agree with that. I think in that fight I took a lot less damage, so as far as gruelling, hard fights, I think I would have lasted another 2 or 3 minutes, so I’d say my fight against Davey in the house was probably my hardest one.”
MH: What was the toughest thing about the TUF experience?
LF: “I honestly think it was just being away from your family. Also, you’re training with people you don’t normally train with, you’re being coached by people you normally aren’t coached by, and you’re living with people that you don’t know. You don’t have time to relax and take yourself out of the game cause you’re training 6 days a week. You’re kind of always in this fierce competition where in a couple days from now I could be fighting my friend or a teammate. You’re just always under pressure, cameras are always watching you. You’re just under a lot of pressure and are out of your comfort zone for six weeks.”
MH: How did you like Meisha Tate as a coach?
LF: “I really liked her actually! We talked about it a couple of times, and I think some people thought she was not doing a great job as a coach. She didn’t bring in a bunch of big name coaches, didn’t bring in a bunch of all-stars and guest coaches. We sat down one day and had a conversation about how it all went down when she found out that she would be coaching. Dana White called her saying, “Cat Zingano got hurt. We need you to come coach. We can’t announce it yet, so you can’t tell anyone about it,” so she really couldn’t recruit coaches. With the time she had to prepare I think she did a fantastic job!”
MH: In watching the season she definitely came off as an excellent coach.
LF:“Yeah. It’s nice to know that someone that was essentially your coach for six weeks does really care about you, and I think that she was someone who really did care about us as fighters and as people. It definitely made it a lot easier to listen to the stuff she was telling us knowing that she had our best interest in mind. “
MH: You have a fight with Rick Pfeifer at XFFC on October 24th. Pfeifer has all 5 of his wins by submission, you have 4 of your 6 wins by submission. Will the plan be to try and get the better of the ground game, or are you going to try and keep this fight standing?
LF:“Honestly, I’m not a huge fan of game plans in general. I find in my experience personally whenever I do set a game plan for myself I always manage to screw it up and I find myself where I originally didn’t want to be. I just plan for the worst case scenario. If the fight stays standing then I plan to get the better of the exchanges, if the fight goes to the ground I always expect him to be the better submission guy. That way in my mind I’m always prepared for the worst case scenario. Now if I go in there and his striking is better than I expected or his grappling is better than I expected, I don’t get surprised by that and I’m set for the worst case scenario and I go from there.”
MH: How many wins away are you from getting into the UFC in your opinion?
LF:“Umm….this is me just being hopeful, but I’d probably say maybe two wins. This fight’s at 130, so if I win this fight in impressive fashion and then make my debut at 125 officially and win that one in some-what of an impressive fashion, than I think that should punch my ticket back there. I’m sure there’s a lot of guys that think that and are dead wrong. I’m hoping for two, but maybe three or four. Who knows? “
MH: Would you ever consider moving away from Winnipeg and maybe training with a big camp like Tri-Star or Greg Jackson’s?
“It’s always something I’ve had in the back of my mind. Just because I think at that point you’re in a room full of guys who are just as good, if not better than you. I’m not saying I don’t get that back at home, but back at Winnipeg, we do have a smaller gym, a dozen pros and four or five guys that fight at 135. I have a good amount of high-level guys to train with, but I don’t think it would compare to being at a Team Alpha Male where you have 20 professional guys at your weight class that would push you every day, every single round.
“I think at some point I will end up making a trip either to Team Alpha Male, which I’ve wanted to check out for a while, obviously Tri-Star if I was going to go somewhere in Canada would be nice. Greg Jacksons, you mentioned, was another good one that I’d be interested in going to see. I think I going to end up finding myself traveling a little bit and seeing what other gyms have out there. I’m not saying I’m planning on moving out anywhere because I do love it at WAMMA. It’s always good to learn different things from different people.”
MH: Why was there such a big delay between TUF and your first fight since being on the show?
LF:“Getting out of the house you can’t do anything. You can’t do any fights or even plan on fighting because you don’t know if you’re going to be with the UFC or without the UFC. You can’t really plan anything until after the finale. Once I had found out I wouldn’t be sticking around with the UFC, my management made some phone calls, and we had some stuff set up with one of the biggest promotions outside of the UFC. Originally the fight was suppose to be December, then it was pushed back to January, then February , then April, then it ended up being in June. I had a trip booked for Europe that I had to push back a year earlier for TUF, so I just decided I’m not going to cancel my trip again. I decided to go on my trip and enjoy it and drop back. I was nursing a couple of injuries so I took a little time off and actually just enjoyed life for a summer.”
MH: Anything else that you would like to add?
LF:“I would love to thank a couple of my sponsors. First off I’d like to thank Jay FreshStart (Jason Edward) from FreshStart Entertainment. He does a fantastic job at what he does, he manages a whole bunch of fighters and a bunch of PR for them. IronJaw Custom Mouthguards, I got a fantastic mouthguard from last week. I know I’m missing a couple, but I’d like to thank all of my sponsors.”
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