“I just want to go out there and beat this dude’s ass, man,” said the 29-year-old middleweight.“It’s been a great camp and it’s been everything that I asked for. I knew that my last fight was on short notice against a real tough guy. And I think my gift for taking that fight was a nice long training camp in the season that I love the most, which is Summer, against a well-versed opponent. So I really just want to go out this time and make a statement that I belong in the UFC and that I can win there.”
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The winning part will have to wait until Saturday, but belonging, Klein more than proved that in his debut against one of the top prospects in the middleweight division in Mansur Abdul-Malik. In that February bout, Klein, who took the fight on short notice, replacing Antonio Trocoli, gave as good as he got in the first round. In the second, Abdul-Malik closed the show, but Klein did gain plenty of fans, and some positives, in defeat.
“Obviously, Mansur fought my teammate, Wesley (Schultz), one of my closest training partners and it was a competitive fight too, at times, with Wes,” said Klein. “I think me and Wesley definitely get the best of each other in certain ways in the gym, but it was kind of daunting knowing that I had to go fight him (Abdul-Malik) and that he beat Wesley up pretty good, even though I think I do well against Wesley in the gym. So I had that fighting against me. And then there was the other thought: do I actually belong in the UFC? I guess I got to go out and fight this killer who everybody’s looking at, and obviously I’m going to be a crazy underdog, and I was, but I still kind of kept in the back of my head that this dude is human, too. He bleeds, too, and I can hurt him, too. And fighting in the arena took a lot of my focus away from just the fight, and it was more like I was seeing the big picture of things when I was walking out and seeing my name and my face up on a jumbotron in this big arena right next to the Space Needle in Seattle.”