Lawlor also gave his thoughts on Israel Adesanya’s UFC 276 entrance.
Beginning next week, New Japan Pro-Wrestling is hosting their G1 Climax 32 tournament which includes a talent pool of 28 people. One of the wrestlers in this year’s tourney is ‘Filthy’ Tom Lawlor.
Lawlor is in the A Block with the likes of Lance Archer, JONAH, Toru Yano, Kazuchika Okada, Jeff Cobb and Bad Luck Fale. He joined the POST Daily News show with Wai Ting and John Pollock on 7/5 and along with chatting about pro wrestling, he spoke about his MMA career.
In March of 2020, it was announced that Lawlor signed a deal with the Professional Fighters League and shortly after, the COVID-19 pandemic came into play and Lawlor did not fight in the PFL until the following year. He detailed what was going through his head during that period of time.
Yeah, well not only that but I hadn’t fought in like a year-and-a-half. I wasn’t really looking to fight when the P.F.L offered me the spot in the tournament so, I went from, ‘Eh, maybe I’ll never fight again. Maybe I’ll just keep wrestling’ to, ‘Holy sh*t, they’re giving me a chance to win a million dollars.’ I’m an idiot if you don’t take that, to that same day, you know, after looking at the contract a couple of times and signing it, he [NBA’s Rudy Gobert] tests positive. The next week, they say they’re not having a season. It was just — I didn’t know if they’d ever have a season. Eventually they did so that worked out luckily but, it went from — basically I went from having a chance at a million dollars to you may just never fight again because now you’re under contract with this company and the other avenue you’re making money in, pro wrestling, pretty much shut down for a few months. Now, luckily, due to that is kind of where New Japan STRONG was born from…
At UFC 276, Israel Adesanya paid homage to The Undertaker with his entrance before beating Jared Cannonier via decision. Lawlor said when he had ideas as such and Dana White was approached about it, White would scoff at it.
It was cool for what it is [Israel Adesayna’s UFC 276 entrance] but it’s kind of funny to see everybody, you know, blowing this up when I used to get blasted by probably the same people or these online trolls, their dads were the ones coming after me for doing similar things and I never really got any support from the UFC doing those. People would ask Dana [White] and he’d kind of scoff at so, what’s the deal here? Is there a double standard? Is that what people are telling me?
To view the July 6th edition of POST Daily News, head over to this link to watch the discussion.
