Former UFC welterweight champion Johny Hendricks has announced that he is retiring from the sport at the age of 34.
“I’m done,” Hendricks confirmed on MMAJunkie Radio. “I’m retiring. I’m getting out of the MMA world.
“I’ve been thinking about this long and hard for a while. I’m going to get back to my roots. I’m going to start coaching at All Saints (Episcopal School in Fort Worth, Texas).”
“I coached a little bit of high school last year, but I’m going to make the move over to All Saints and start doing those things.”
While Hendricks reached the very summit of the UFC’s 170lb weight class at the peak of his career, the last few years have been tough for ‘Bigg Rigg’ suffering defeat in five of his last six fights and also having to endure a series of failed weight-cut attempts that damaged his reputation and on one occasion even saw him rushed to hospital.
However, Hendricks, whose biggest wins came against the likes of Robbie Lawler, Matt Brown, Carlos Condit, Jon Fitch and Josh Koscheck, claims that spending more time with his family also factored into the equation.
“One of the things that’s nice is being home the last seven months, spending time with the kids, not worrying about what I needed to do,” Hendricks said. “I looked at my wife and said, ‘Do we really want to do this? I know I’m the one who has to do it, but do we want to do it? Do we want to go through the grind that I used to do, be gone for long periods of time, put my family second, do those kids of things?’ Right now, I can’t really say that.
“I made this decision two weeks ago, but I prayed about it and wanted to make sure I was going to be OK with it.”
