For Bonus King Joe Lauzon, Entertaining More Important Than Winning

He also added a win to his record when he tapped Jamie Varner with a triangle choke, but getting his hand raised was not Lauzon’s main goal.

“Honestly, winning and losing doesn’t matter to me as much as having an exciting fight, a fight that I would want to watch,” Lauzon told the Sherdog Radio Network’s “Beatdown” show. “I think there’s a lot of other guys that they’ll win pretty much every single time out, but they have boring fights most of the time. I don’t want to have that. Win, lose, regardless, I want to have exciting fights. The bonuses just come as a result.”

Lauzon’s two bonuses Saturday earned him an additional $100,000. At this point, he more or less anticipates a bonus every time he fights.

“I think it’s because I put myself out on a limb a lot of times,” Lauzon said. “I really, really want to get that finish. I really want to hurt people. Sometimes I go out too far and they end up cutting the branch out from under me, but I set out to finish someone every single time. I’m not even thinking about trying to win a decision when I fight. Every single time I’m out there, I’m trying to finish the guy. I’m trying to really hurt the guy. I feel like a lot of other guys aren’t doing that. It’s more like a point fight to them. Like, ‘Oh, we won the first round. We won the second round. OK, we’ll coast through the third.’ That’s not me. My coaches were telling me in the third, ‘Push, push, push.’”

That’s when Lauzon got the finish, catching Varner with the choke 2:44 into the final period. It was only the second time in his UFC career that he went past the second round.

“For the most part I push really, really hard, and sometimes that push ends partway through the first or early in the second and then I can’t recover,” Lauzon said. “But I’m working on getting better at that. There were a couple of times in this fight where I was getting a little bit tired, but I took a second and got my breath a little bit. Before I would have just pushed on mindlessly and then had a really tough time recovering.”

Lauzon has now won three of his last four in the UFC. He might emphasize entertaining over winning, but he’s still winning and he still believes a UFC title run is in his future.

“I definitely have some great momentum,” he said. “Some people are saying crazy talk, like title implications, like I’m going to be fighting for a title soon and they’re Tweeting at me and Dana [White], saying give me a title shot. It’s like, ‘Guys, you’ve got to relax.’ I had a good fight. It was an exciting fight, but I’ve got to put a few more wins together and I know that. It’s not a case of getting two wins together. It’s going to be three or four. I’ve still got to put away some good guys.”

Listen to the full interview (beginning at 1:27:22).