Julian Marquez thankful to get finish at UFC on FOX 26 after brief moment of self-doubt

WINNIPEG – At some point Saturday night, Darren Stewart popped Julian Marquez in the mouth and it made him question if he really wanted to be standing in a cage in the middle of a fist fight.

“You have a split moment in there where it’s like, ‘Should I give up, or should I keep going?'” Marquez said after his win at UFC on FOX 26. “You have something telling you, ‘Give up now,’ and you have the other part saying, ‘Don’t give up – this is where you want to be. This is who you are.”

Who Marquez (7-1 MMA, 1-0 UFC) was Saturday was a finisher when he submitted Stewart (7-3 MMA, 0-3 UFC) with a guillotine choke midway through the second round of their middleweight fight on the prelims at Bell MTS Place in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The main card aired on FOX following prelims on FS1 and UFC Fight Pass.

The fight was Marquez’s UFC debut, and once he knew he wasn’t going to give up, things started to go his way. Not only did he get the finish, but he picked up an extra $50,000 for “Fight of the Night.”

“That’s what I want,” he said. “I want to sit there and slug it out. It doesn’t matter how hard you hit or your technique. Mike Tyson said once you get punched in the face, that goes out the window … 100 percent true, man.

“The moment he hit me in the face, I was like, ‘All right, we’re banging it out. Let’s see who has the tougher will and tougher want.'”

Marquez said maybe as important as anything else was the fact he was able to get a finish in the fight, though.

“I like finishing the fight soon, sure,” he said. “I don’t have this many fights like this in my life. I don’t want (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy brain disease) at the end of my time, sitting there not being able to pick up a spoon.”

To hear more from Marquez, check out the video above.

And for complete coverage of UFC on FOX 26, check out the UFC Events section of the site.