Aljamain Sterling (21-3, 10 finishes) moves on from a pair of bantamweight championship fights against Petr Yan to make his next title defense against former champ TJ Dillashaw (17-4, 11 finishes) in the UFC 280 co-headliner on Oct. 22 in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. The Long Island native spoke via Zoom with The Post’s Scott Fontana on Wednesday for the latest Q&A session of the Post Fight Interview.
Q: You and Leon Edwards snapped a photo not long after he won the welterweight belt. What does having a champion born in Jamaica mean to you, also a UFC champion and son of Jamaican immigrants?
A: I think it’s huge. I think it’s monumental for the sport, I think it’s monumental for the country. And for him, it’s a little bit more endearing, I think, because he was actually born there before moving to the [United Kingdom]. Me, I just went there a couple of times as a youth and as an adult. After my fight with Renan Barao is when I went down there for two weeks. I did some free seminars and stuff like that, just to give back to the community, that type of thing. I think him and myself will be able to inspire so many people I get a lot of messages from Jamaicans and people that either live in the [United] States and they’re first-generation Jamaicans as well, and just letting us know how proud they are of me and, of course, of Leon Edwards. And even before Leon won the belt, there was a lot of support for him to be the next guy to win the belt. And it’s kind of rough because I like Kamaru [Usman] as well. I don’t say we’re, like, friends or boys or anything like that, but we’re cool. We hang out whenever we see each other kind of thing. We say what’s up. So that was kind of like a bittersweet kind of victory because you never want to see somebody lose like that. And obviously, you want to see another countryman do well because we just know what it means to the nation.
Q: Your fight coming up is only three weeks before the UFC at Madison Square Garden. You’ve never fought in your home state; would you have liked the chance to compete at home this time?
A: It would have been nice. I fought here as an amateur. Unfortunately, New York state won’t let me fight here as a pro for whatever medical reasons that they deem [are] different from any other state and other country because clearly I could fight in Abu Dhabi, but I can’t fight in New York, which really makes no sense.
Q: What’s the story with that?
A: I couldn’t give you the correct technical terms. … It’s pretty black and white, I can compete in all these other states. I’m sure they have medical doctors, they have their own rules or whatever. You guys have your own rules. How come you’re the only one that won’t get on board versus everybody else? It’s like them being on the list of banning athletes again and banning the sport the way that they were and taking so long to accept that this sport can do so much for the state in terms of revenue, creating job opportunities. It is what it is, though. I guess the nicer part is not having so many people reach out to you for tickets and stuff like that. A bunch of people still reach out to me for tickets. I’m like, “dude, I don’t sell tickets anymore.” Those days are long gone. The last time I sold tickets was for Cage Fury [FC], and even then, when I was selling the tickets, people would never come buy ’em. But now, everybody wants to buy ’em, which is cool; don’t get me wrong. It’s cool. But that support would have been nice back then when I actually got a cut of the ticket sales. I don’t get a cut of the ticket sales now.
Q: When was the first time you tried to get licensed to fight in New York?
A: Multiple times. They had multiple events in New York that they tried to get me on, and I was on the card for like a split second, and I was off the card almost as fast as they put me on. So it’s just been weird. Like I said, I can fight anywhere else. I’m going overseas and competing. You would think that it’d be OK. Hopefully, they just get their s–t together, man, because New York is a great state. We’re definitely taxed really, really high, though (laughs). … Again, it’s one of those things, it’d be nice to do because of all the love that I think I would get from people that I haven’t seen in years that I grew up with. But in terms of saving money, I’m not really that pressed about it.
Q: You’ve got Dillashaw next, and you’ve not been shy about taunting him for his suspension for using EPO. How much of it is building hype with some verbal warfare, and how much is it you being irked about the fact he used performance-enhancing drugs in the first place?
A: Oh, definitely 100 percent irked by that. I think any athlete who’s competing clean would say that they don’t give two s–ts for T.J. or anybody, for that matter, who’s doing stuff like that. At the end of the day, I respect him as an athlete in the sense of, like, he has the desire and the will and the heart to actually get in the cage and fight against another human weapon that’s been training to break him down. And that’s commendable. I think that takes a certain type of mindset and a certain type of grit that you’ve gotta have in character. But at the end of the day, he’s not a clean athlete. He’s never been a clean athlete in the UFC, as far as I know personally from his own teammates. So he can say whatever he wants, that, oh, I’m building in excuses. I’m like, is it building in excuses? I already made peace with the fact. … Win or lose, I’m stepping into a cage with him. It’s not going to be, Oh, you beat me because of this. When I beat you, even if you’re on this stuff again, that just makes me look that much better. And if you are on it, that’s whatever. I accept that, too.
Q: Do you think he’s clean now?
A: No, I don’t. I know he’s got the Clean Juice, his little restaurant that he has (laughs), which is so ironic that the guy who’s got popped for sticking needles up his bum has a restaurant called Clean Juice. If irony had a face or a picture in the dictionary, it’s T.J. standing next to Clean Juice with a needle on one hand, a bottle of smoothie shake in the other.
Q: How do you view his times as champion of the division? It sounds like they’re tainted, in your mind.
A: Oh, 100% tainted. I think it was back when it was like “The Ultimate Fighter” [in 2011], he got knocked out by [John] Dodson in the finale and came back on this crazy run. And on that run, that’s when the rumblings had started about T.J. being on stuff. And where there’s smoke, there’s fire. It wasn’t coming from people that are outside the gym; there’s people that are inside your gym that are talking about it. And those people have also still confirmed to this day that he was doing s–t way back then. So he can say whatever he wants. “Oh, USADA tested me.” Like, T.J., stop! Just stop! You came clean, right? You got caught, and then you came clean, so just come clean about the whole thing. Who cares at this point? We all know already. … And hopefully, when I’m 50 and when you’re 50, and you’re falling apart, you’ll know why, and you’ll see if it was worth it for you to do all that stuff to your body at this age. Look at him now. Look at his body falling apart now, I wonder why; I really wonder why.
Q: Do you remember your first experience watching MMA?
A: It was when I was a young kid. I was just scrolling through the TV. I didn’t even know what a channel guide was. This is how taught I was at home, just the home training in the sense of parents showing you how things worked. We didn’t necessarily have that growing up, man. You kind of just figured it out on your own. I don’t know if it was like a cultural thing, but I learned a lot of things on my own. I would just scroll through the channels at night, multiple nights in a row, hoping that I would just find MMA. And I didn’t really know what it was. I didn’t know what the UFC was, but that’s what it was that was on TV, and I just never knew when it would come on. And sometimes I would find it, and I was always intrigued and fascinated by it. I couldn’t tell you who it was that was fighting. I was too young and didn’t really pay attention to that. I was just watching the sport, just watching these guys get after it. … The way I remember it, I didn’t even know what a channel guide was to show you what time certain things come on. I’m gonna say maybe high school, like my freshman year or eighth-grade year, or something like that, and that would have been like 2002, 2003.
Q: What is the coolest technique in combat sports?
A: For me, it’s gotta be a submission. I enjoy the triangle choke, for some reason. And I enjoy a good Peruvian necktie. … Merab [Dvalishvili, friend and UFC bantamweight contender] actually hits that a lot, and then he kind of re-inspired me to start doing it again. And now, I go for it a lot more, too. Yeah, I like the necktie. It’s a fascinating way to get strangled.