There’s no losing. There’s only learning.
That’s the philosophy Corner Brook’s Jacob Kelly is using to help him deal with his first mixed martial arts loss.
Kelly dropped a three-round decision to No. 1 ranked Corey Forsythe for the bantamweight crown at Elite 1 MMA’s Cage Warriors mixed martial arts event Saturday night at Casino New Brunswick.
All three ringside judges gave the fight to the top-ranked MMA bantamweight in Atlantic Canada. One judge scored it 30-27, while the other two scored it 29-28 in favour of Forsythe.
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“It’s a hard lesson to learn, but I’m going to learn from this and I’m going to come back and I’m going to be better than I was before,” Kelly said Monday while he was recuperating from some dings and bruises in his first MMA loss. He falls to 2-1 as an amateur.
Kelly thought there were some areas where he would have the upper hand on his opponent going into the event, but it didn’t materialize like he envisioned.
He thought it was a real close fight and didn’t want to offer any comment on if he thought he did enough to win the fight. He just figures his strength collided with Forsythe’s and the judges had the final say.
He didn’t want the judges to play a role in the fight, but they did. He was hoping to knock out his opponent — just like he thought Forsythe was trying to do to him — but there’s not much he could do when it was left in somebody else’s hands.
“I’m there to step into the cage and do what I was training to do. I’m not there to judge the fight,” he said.
“It’s a hard pill to swallow but it’s part of the game,” he added. “It’s something that other fighters deal with and it’s something I’m going to deal with, and we’ll see what the future has for me.”
While he’s trying to deal with the disappointment, Kelly believes he will back in the gym within a week or so.
He’s not ready to give up life in the cage just yet. He knows other fighters have felt the sting of their first loss and come back to be stronger and better because of the experience.
“Right now I’m down on myself and a little heartbroken,” he said. “This is what fighters do.
“This is part of the game and I got to play it.”
