Athletes
Billy Goff Is Willing To Take The Risks
Ahead Of His Second UFC Bout, Billy Goff Is Hoping To Create Some Momentum With Consistency At UFC Fight Night: Lewis vs Nascimento
After a year spent waiting for his UFC debut, Billy Goff wanted nothing more than to stay busy after he halted Yusaku Kinoshita in less than four minutes in that first trip to the Octagon last August.
The universe had other plans, with a car accident aiding in keeping him sidelined until his return this Saturday against Trey Waters. Nine months out of action is never good, but if there are positives to be gleaned from the situation, the Connecticut product is only 25, and he found to make the time off work for him.
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“It's all about making things habits,” he said. “If your instinct is to do what you should be doing, you make it a habit. You're doing it every day, every other day, whatever it is, then you just keep up that habit, you stay diligent, and then you don't have to fight yourself to do the right things.”
Those habits in the gym have paid off, with Goff winning nine of his 11 pro bouts, seven of them by knockout and seven in a row. But time away is time away, so how can he match that fight night intensity in the gym, if at all?
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“You can't exactly replicate it, but you can get close,” Goff said. “Sparring can get close. Then, in your head, you can get close. You can walk to the cage, hear your music, picture yourself warming up, picture yourself in the cage. You've been there before, so you can get yourself close. You can go to other fights, and when I corner my teammates or I'm watching fights, I can get myself close, mentally, but you're always a little bit away. It's never the same.”
A key is also that in the gym, Goff isn’t trying to finish his teammates.
“No matter what, I never go past 90% while sparring because that last 10% is me wanting to hurt you, and I don't want to hurt my teammates.”
Goff is days away from letting that ten percent go, but since we’re on the topic of replicating a fight, how does the New Englander replicate fighting a 6-foot-5 welterweight? Well, he did find a 6-foot-7 welterweight in the aptly monikered “Scarecrow,” local Massachusetts prospect Trevor Gudde, and as far as strategy goes, he’s a young man with a plan.
“It poses some different problems in the striking and the grappling, and it changes the way you look at it,” he said. “But there's pros and cons to everything. His face is further away from me, but his body is a lot bigger, so there's a lot more surface area to hit there. His legs are longer, so those are closer. I can get to his hips a lot easier. He can't really get to mine that easily. He's got to come down a lot further. And if he's super tall and skinnier, that means he's not carrying as much muscle.”
In short, Goff is as confident as he’s ever been that he’s going to leave the APEX with his second UFC win. As for the first one, that was one he won’t soon forget, as he traveled to Singapore and halted the highly regarded Kinoshita.
“I definitely got to take it in, and I certainly would've missed a lot of it because it was all moving so fast,” Goff said. “It was such a big moment. But my coach, (Michael) Dexter, kept reminding me, and even when we were in the cage after the fight, he was like, ‘Hey, take this in. You only get it one time. You only get one debut. Absorb all of it. Just absorb the moment.’ So it was really good to have someone saying, ‘Hey, be present right now. Take it all in.’”
It was almost worth the 23-hour flight. Imagine what it would have been like if he lost.
“Oh, man,” he said. “Losing that fight, I don’t know, I might've jumped off the plane.”
Goff laughs, at ease and ready to begin the next chapter of his fighting career. It’s a promising one, with the buzz already getting louder, and that’s no shocker, considering his consistent desire to end a fight as soon as possible. That’s a mindset wanted by most but only shared by a few, and that’s in him for as long as he puts on four-ounce gloves.
“I am always willing to take the risk because, at the end of the day, the worst thing that's going to happen is I'm going to get knocked out,” he said. “I could get finished and I'll still be the same man I was when I walked into that cage. But it's just the way that I fight. When I fight, I'm fighting to hurt you and I'm fighting to finish you. That's what I'm doing. There's always a chance that you're going to catch me and win. But if I finish you now, there's no more chance for you to win.”
UFC Fight Night: Lewis vs Nascimento took place live from Enterprise Center in St. Louis, Missouri on May 11, 2024. See the final Prelim and Main Card results, Official Scorecards and Who Won Bonuses - and relive the action on UFC Fight Pass!