Bellator's Claxton explains why wrestling still reigns supreme in MMA
You wouldn't know it from his pro debut, but Tywan Claxton cut his teeth in a singlet and head gear before he ever donned four-ounce gloves.
A D-II All-American wrestler at King University with another two years of experience at Ohio University, the budding featherweight prospect kicked off his MMA foray with a seemingly ideal foundation for the bouillabaisse of tools paramount to sustained success in the hurt business.
The flying knee Claxton threw halfway across the cage to put Jonny Bonilla-Bowman's lights out in his first professional fight at Bellator 186 can certainly stand as a testament to how far MMA has come in its brief existence. But while the ability to choose where the action goes down is no longer the trump card it was in the embryonic days of Claxton's ever-evolving, newfound calling, the 25-year-old maintained that a lifetime of going through a bevy of grueling motions still gives wrestlers a leg up in the cage when speaking to theScore ahead of his sophomore bout at Friday's Bellator 194.
"Absolutely, because for the most part, like you said, you can dictate where the fight takes place, but there’s something about a high-level wrestler and the grind," Claxton said. "And when you’re able to grind, you’re able to beat 90 percent of the people out there, and that’s the difference between a wrestler and a boxer or a kickboxer.
"A wrestler, they compete every single weekend, they make weight all the time, it’s not a struggle. We go through adversity basically our entire lives. That’s the key up, that’s the edge. You’ve already been mentally prepared to go through a grind to get through different things and be the toughest guy that you can be, just from the sport of wrestling, and I don’t think you get that from every other sport."
Claxton might have diversified his regimen when his aspirations took him to Florida's Blackzilians camp in 2015, but it remained just as arduous thanks to coach Neil Melanson. The prospect drilled incessantly under the lauded grappling guru's watch, a multi-layered routine that - luckily for Claxton - bore shades of the endless grind of his college days.
"He’s willing to do anything to help you as a person, to just get through life, period. But as a coach, he’s very meticulous," Claxton said of Melanson. "Everything’s down to the tee, and he tries to think and drill through every situation and that helped me a lot as a fighter because I can run my own training camp.
"I know exactly what I need to do and how I like to fight. I know that I need to be sharp on the cage, I know that I need to have ground control, I need to work on pointing my shots to my takedowns, work on submissions from the shot, the blending of the punches to the shot to the takedown to the ground control, pass the guard. He chains everything together almost like it’s wrestling and that’s a huge key for me, as a former collegiate wrestler. He just helps develop your overall MMA game, and it’s something crazy."
It's often been said iron sharpens iron, and Claxton promptly proved the old adage right, compiling a 7-0 record on Florida's amateur circuit before Bellator brought him into a featherweight fold already boasting blue-chippers AJ McKee, Aaron Pico, and James Gallagher last year.
With Melanson now calling Denver home, Claxton returned to his native Cleveland once he'd scored the flying knee heard 'round the world and took his talents to Marcus Marinelli's Strong Style MMA - a guild that's produced UFC heavyweight champion Stipe Miocic and flyweight Jessica Eye. The Ohio product admitted Marinelli and Melanson sit at opposite ends of the coaching spectrum in terms of curriculum, but aims to visit the latter regularly in Colorado and draw from both to round out his game.
"It’s different training. Neil was a lot of ground (game) and drilling and Marcus, they like to do a lot of stand-up, a lot of pure boxing, Muay Thai, stuff of that nature. But I just kind of take what I can take from the program and I do my own thing in the mornings as far as still sticking with the things that Neil’s taught me, so it’s kind of the best of both worlds."
Claxton makes his second walk to the cage as a pro in Bellator 194's main-card curtain-jerker against Jose Antonio Perez at Mohegan Sun Arena in Connecticut.