One of the things about interviewing lots of fighters is that you hear a lot of the same things over and over. Best training camp of my life. Iron sharpens iron. My opponent has never fought anyone like me before. You know how it goes.
That makes it feel extra strange when one of them — in this case, Dustin Poirier, who winds down his career at UFC 318 in New Orleans on Saturday — tells you something unexpectedly wise or insightful or even oddly poetic.
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You see, back in 2014, I spent about a week at the American Top Team gym in Coconut Creek, Florida. The place was a true shark tank of elite fighters. You’d walk in and see Robbie Lawler, who’d just won the UFC welterweight title, strapping on the gloves for a mitt session. Thiago Alves and Hector Lombard might be sparring in the cage. Over against the wall, former Strikeforce champ “King” Mo Lawal would be shooting takedowns on a rotating cast of ranked light heavyweights.
Colby Covington and Jorge Masvidal were two of the lesser-known names on the gym’s roster — and they were basically best friends. That’s what a different time it was.
This is where I found Poirier training for his first fight with Conor McGregor. The McGregor of 2014 was not yet a full-fledged superstar, but you could sense he was on his way. Poirier had won three straight and was thinking that if he could beat McGregor he might steal some of the Irishman’s stardust and maybe even find himself in a title fight soon. This accounted for the work I saw from him in the gym that week, which can only be described as fanatical.
At the end of one particularly long and brutal sparring session — all of it against teammates well out of his weight class — I made an attempt to ask Poirier what was going on in his mind through all this. Here he was, a 25-year-old man who’d left the only home he’d ever known, in Lafayette, Louisiana, to come to South Florida. He didn’t know anybody there. His family was hundreds of miles away. And here he was, fighting monsters every day and hoping it would pay off in the end.
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He’d been in training camp for two solid months by the time I spoke to him, and he still had a couple more weeks to go. The bruises on his face barely had time to heal before he added more. There was something going on somewhere in his ribs that he wasn’t thrilled about but had to try to work around. He was exhausted and literally hungry much of the time, owing to his pre-weight cut diet. It all sounded fairly miserable, to be honest. So how did he get through it?
His answer was simple but direct. Training camp always seems impossible, he said, “if you try to live all the days at once.” If you think about the enormity of the task and the sacrifice, let yourself dwell on how long and punishing it is, then sure, it’ll feel unbearable. But you don’t actually have to live all the days all at once. The only day you have to live is today. Put it another way, the only day you get to live is today.
“I remind myself not to take that for granted,” he said. “I don’t have to do any of this. This is a gift, man.”
Something about the way he said this, I noticed that it even made him look different. He was standing there covered in sweat, blood drying inside his nose, his chest still heaving with big, tired breaths. A moment before that had all made him seem like a man who was suffering and sacrificing in hope of some future reward. But the way he talked about it, now it just made him look very alive. He was intensely engaged in work he found meaningful, and there was a satisfaction in that.
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I ended up thinking about this a lot at various points thereafter. Years later I even put it in a poem (originally published here, but this is the free version if you’re curious) that was part of a series on fight sports. It stuck with me because I felt like something I in particular needed to hear. For those of us who might be naturally inclined toward pessimism, there’s a real value in being reminded that your life is not something to be merely endured or trudged through. It is not something you have to do. It is something you get to do — and not even for all that long.
It also struck me later that this was the kind of mid-training camp insight I’d probably only get from someone like Poirier, who had to work harder and suffer more just to give himself a good chance in this sport. He was never one of those guys who just showed up on TV one day with obvious and extraordinary gifts. He was a high school drop-out from the poor side of Lafayette who willed himself into becoming a professional athlete through sheer desire and toil and pure old stubbornness.
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This, as much as anything, explains his enduring popularity as he comes now to the end of his fighting career. Poirier never became the world’s best lightweight. That first fight against McGregor, which he hoped might propel him toward a featherweight title shot? Even after all that blood and sacrifice, he got knocked out in the first round.
But the fact that he kept going, kept improving, kept finding ways to claw his way back to relevance and respect, it spoke to people. It also helped that he seemed like a genuinely good dude who, even back before he had much of a platform in the UFC, was auctioning off his own gear after fights to support his local food bank.
Poirier has always been one of those fighters who reminds us that people don’t just watch this sport for knockouts and triumphs — they watch for the human drama and the inspiration. People watched him rise and fall and rise up again, and it meant something to them. If anything, it meant more because of how hard he had to work for it all. He wasn’t born to athletic success. He had to find a way to create it for himself.
I think that’s part of what gave him such a valuable sense of perspective. It was there when he was 25 and on the way up, but also now that he’s 36 and ready to call it a career after Saturday’s fight with Max Holloway. Fans feel connected and invested not because he’s the best, but because he meant something to them as both a person and a fighter.
Poirier earned every bit of the respect he’ll carry in and out of the cage on Saturday. And that, too, he never took for granted.
