Luke Rockhold will never forget the rude welcome Vitor Belfort gave him in his first UFC fight.
Fighting outside the United States for the first time (in his opponent's home country, no less) against a top-ranked middleweight, Rockhold was beaten when Belfort, whose name has been linked with performance-enhancing drugs, dropped him with a highlight-reel spin kick to the skull.
"I knew exactly what I was doing and that's why I got so emotional about it," Rockhold told Brendan Schaub on the "Fighter and The Kid" podcast. "I knew that I had to go fight this guy in Brazil, on steroids, and no one believed in me. And no one respected me. And I got put in this fucking situation and it pissed me off.
"All the weight came on my shoulders at that time, but it was the best thing that ever happened to me. If you look at how I carried myself after that fight and how much better I've gotten from that, I was a kid then and I matured so much more in and outside the cage.
"That fight was everything to me. I'm so thankful I got kicked in the head. Thank you (Belfort), thank you but I'm gonna fucking kill you."
Rockhold finished his next five opponents, most recently Chris Weidman from whom he took the UFC middleweight championship. The loss to Belfort is the only stain on his UFC resume, and it came during a stretch when Belfort was exploiting a testosterone-replacement therapy exemption.
"It's unbelievable the stuff he gets away with. He should be prosecuted at a certain level, like he could potentially have been the guy to take (Michael) Bisping's eye," Rockhold said, referring to another one of Belfort's brutal knockouts. "Stuff like that, it's just unreal how he can get away with it and he needs to be punished and I'm the man to do it."
Rockhold wants another shot at "The Phenom" so badly that he's willing to forgo a potentially lucrative rematch with Weidman and a fight with intriguing challenger Yoel Romero.
