Veteran coach John Hackleman has revealed that he will quit cornering fighters after Glover Teixeira’s tough unanimous decision loss to Jamahal Hill at UFC 283 this past Saturday night.
Hackleman, who is the first admit that he tends to lean strongly towards fights being stopped sooner than later if someone is taking a lot of punishment clearly had a hard time with the amount of damage that the 43-year-old Teixeira sustained during what would prove to be the final fight of his career.
“That’s my last cornering,” Hackleman told MMA Fighting. “I’m never going to work a corner again.
“I just don’t like to see guys get any kind of beatings or brain damage. I’m just real quick on the gun.”
Hackleman went on to reveal that if he’d had his way the fight would have been waved off at the end of the third round.
“I’m thankful they didn’t [stop it]. I know this wouldn’t have gone well with anyone. It would have made a lot of people really unhappy, and I don’t want it to be about me. I would have thrown it in after the third. I would have been completely happy with the fight stopping there. I saw no reason for it to go on after that.”
Hackleman is the founder of ‘The Pit’ training camp, whose two most famous fighters are Teixeira and another former light-heavyweight champion Chuck Liddell.
As such it’s perhaps understandable why Hackleman has a knee-jerk reaction to fighters potentially suffering long-term damage as Liddell’s late-career downward spiral of KO and TKO losses became so troubling that UFC president Dana intervened to ensure he wouldn’t fight in the UFC again.
The 63-year-old Hackleman says he intends to continue training fighters, but is relieved to no longer have to concern himself with the stress and strain that comes with being a cornerman.
