Months after controversial loss, Ross Pearson reflects on a robbery

All that night and into the next morning, Ross Pearson remained absolutely convinced of one thing: He won that fight against Diego Sanchez on June 7.

The two judges who said otherwise, the ones who handed Sanchez a controversial victory in perhaps the worst decision in UFC history? They were just plain wrong, Pearson told himself. That opinion was backed up by fans – “in Albuquerque,” Pearson stressed, “the fans from his hometown!” – who couldn’t wait to tell him just how badly and obviously he’d been cheated out of a win as he made his way through the arena.

“It was laughable,” Pearson told MMAjunkie. “Coming out of the Diego Sanchez fight, there was no one who could tell me that I didn’t win that fight. I was 100 percent confident that I won that. I don’t care what anyone else says about it.”

It wasn’t until his flight home the day after UFC Fight Night 42 that the doubt began to creep in. What if he was wrong? What if it hadn’t been as one-sided as it had seemed in the moment? What if he was brooding over a perceived injustice that really wasn’t, making him just another crybaby fighter who couldn’t accept that maybe he hadn’t dominated quite so thoroughly as he’d thought?

Pearson didn’t want to be that guy. Nobody does. So he did the only reasonable thing he could think of. He got out his laptop and watched the fight. Then he watched it again. And again.

“I was kind of thinking, ‘Let’s watch the fight like it’s just two people fighting, like it wasn’t me in there,’” Pearson said. “I watched it three times, and I literally could not see what the judges were saying. I won that.”

Fortunately for Pearson, the UFC agreed. It paid him his win bonus, which was “a massive thing” for him, Pearson said. It also resolved to move forward with future matchmaking decisions as if Pearson (15-7 MMA, 7-4 UFC) had won the fight. The only evidence to the contrary is his professional record, which will now and forever reflect a loss to Sanchez (25-7 MMA, 14-7 UFC), no matter what anyone else says.

“It’s a sad thing, because this is my career,” Pearson said. “It has still had a bit of a positive effect because the fans know I won that fight, the media know I won that fight, so it hasn’t done me any harm in my career, but it is a loss on my record, which is disappointing.”

There’s only one thing that will ease the sting of that disappointment now, and that’s a win – a real one, too, preferably the type that doesn’t involve the judges. That’s what he was thinking when he was originally slotted for a match-up with Abel Trujillo at UFC Fight Night 47, he said, and it’s still what he’s thinking now that Trujillo is out and former title contender Gray Maynard is in for the Aug. 16 bout.

Here Pearson is, 29 years old, five years into his UFC run. This should be when things start kicking into high gear. Instead he’s got a loss and a no-contest to show for his past two outings, and he isn’t getting any younger.

However, Pearson said, he is getting wiser. Or maybe he’s just getting less worried about all the things that can go wrong, the bad decisions and questionable stoppages, the weird endings and disappointing losses. Things happen fast in this sport, he pointed out. If you spend your time dwelling on it, you won’t be ready for the next big moment, or the one after that.

“When I first started in the UFC, I was only 24,” Pearson said. “I was a little bit hesitant in my own ability. I was questioning, do I belong here? Now that I’ve been in the UFC for five years, I don’t worry about what anyone else is doing. I don’t worry about some bad position where I’ll get beat up. I don’t worry about any of that. I just believe in my abilities and what I’m doing, because I’m training with world-class fighters and I’m beating these guys.”

Now if he could only get the judges to see things his way. Or, better yet, render them irrelevant.

For more on UFC Fight Night 47, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.