Reliving Knee Part of Dealing with Aldo Loss for Chad Mendes

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Chad Mendes, on “The Savage Dog Show,” discussing how he’s dealt with his loss to Jose Aldo:

“A loss sucks no matter what. No matter where, no matter when. It’s just something that I’ve kind of had to deal with. It’s my first one in my MMA career. Losing is just something that I absolutely hate. Actually for the first couple of weeks, it was pretty hard for me to deal with. I was just going over what happened in my mind and just reliving that mistake, the few seconds right before I got hit with that knee, and it just sucks. I felt like I was winning that round. That was kind of the plan, to really make sure we won those first couple of rounds because we had seen in past fights that his cardio kind of went downhill. We knew he was going to come out at his best obviously in the first couple of rounds, the most dangerous. You could tell that [the knee] was something they really had worked on and really practiced. I don’t feel like he actually saw me coming in and threw a knee. He basically just turned and threw. My reaction was to drop for that double leg, and I just got caught with that knee. It sucks. A little bit to the left, a little bit to the right, and it probably would have just grazed and we would have went to round two, but it just happened to be right on the kisser.”