We at SportsJOE wouldn’t fancy a tackle or a punch but Cathal Pendred has handed out and taken plenty of both.
The UFC welterweight has a Leinster school’s medal from a 2005 Senior Cup team that produced five pros such as Ian Keatley and Cian Healy as well as the retired duo of Paul O’Donohue and Eoin O’Malley.
And the MMA fighter, who is 2-0 in the UFC and 15-2-1 overall, revealed that he considers rugby more dangerous than MMA.
Speaking to Brendan Fanning and Peter O’Reilly on the Down the Blind Side podcast, Pendred said: “Not to take anything away from rugby but I’d honestly think that rugby, when you look into it more, is the more dangerous sport.
“You’ve got these guys, who are massive men, running full tilt and hitting each other with forceful momentum that is very intense.
“The other thing is, if you’re a guy with a ball on the pitch and you’re running down the line, it’s not just one person that you’re looking out for. You can be getting tackled from either side.
“In mixed martial arts, you’ve got one guy and the aim of the game is to protect yourself. The referee tells you beforehand ‘Protect yourself at all times and if you cease to protect yourself, I’ll stop the bout’ whereas in rugby, I remember being told to ‘put your body on the line for the ball’.”
“The Punisher” believes the competitive and physical aspect of rugby played an important role in his transition to the world of mixed martial arts
“Rugby was the first time I found my true competitive nature.
“When I played rugby, I wasn’t as concerned with getting my hands on the ball or making a run. What I loved was making a good tackle and hitting the rucks and really doing some damage trying to turn the ball over.
“It was the physicality of the rugby that really appealed to me so when I found mixed martial arts, it was like finding a more concentrated version of what I loved about rugby.
“I’m very happy and fortunate that I found mixed martial arts because I think it suits me better.”
Away from the competition aspect of both sports, Pendred believes that the tackling element of rugby aided his grappling techniques when he took to the mat for the first time.
He said: “I attribute a lot of my success in MMA to my rugby career. Technically, I really took to the grappling and wrestling of the sport thanks to my rugby background.
“It wasn’t until I started mixed martial arts that I realised that rugby players really do have a great understanding of wrestling, which is basically getting someone down to the ground.
“That would be considered a weakness of the European mixed martial artists, compared to their American counterparts because obviously over in America, wrestling is a big part of high school and college.
“But in my case that hasn’t been a factor and I definitely attribute that to rugby.”
Pendred reveals that he believes he was always destined to gravitate towards a more individual sport.
He said: “I thrive on one-on-one opposition. If you’d talk to any of my team-mates at Belvedere, weirdly enough, I used to always pick someone on the opposition team and either try to outplay them if they were in a similar position to me or just try to spoil their game.
“I think any individual sport is a lot more mentally challenging, whether it be MMA or golf or tennis, you’re going out there on your own and everything is on you. You can go out to play a rugby game and not show up for the first five or ten minutes and it may not make a difference but in individual sports you need to be switched on from the start.”
Pendred’s next fight comes on January 18 when he takes on 12-3 Sean Spencer in Boston, MA on the undercard of Conor McGregor v Dennis Siver.
To listen to his interview in full, just click here
