Fighter says stay positive to realize your dreams
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Rotary Club of Fairview had a guest speaker, one who may be more used to letting his fists speak for him but still delivered an interesting and inspiring presentation.
Justin Knoepfli, originally of Hines Creek is now a heavy-duty mechanic and a mixed martial arts fighter. If you don’t know what mixed martial arts is, basically, fighters use any style they want and beat the stuffing out of each other until one wins. Knoepfli fights at 135 lbs so he isn’t a big guy, but he is fit. He started off in boxing but without a coach decided to go into mixed martial arts and found Bill Mahood to coach him, asking to join his team and being accepted. He found he was good at it and stayed with it,
At Rotary, he mainly talked about the importance of staying positive, he was invited to fight at Nationals in Lethbridge and if he had won, he would have gone on to Worlds Championship in Bahrain (400 fighters and five days of fights with everything supplied for the fighters). Instead, once the fight card was announced, he was assailed by doubt, feeling he wasn’t worthy, hadn’t trained hard enough and lost.
He impressed somebody enough being undefeated in the Grande Prairie area to be invited to fight in an area championship, broke his hand in the second round of the fight. His coach told him, don’t worry, it will “numb up.” So he concentrated on thinking positive, went back out and won the match, going all five rounds. Now he is off for a while waiting for his hand to heal properly – he admitted going back to training hard too soon and re-injuring the hand but is now going to be very careful – he needs his hands for work as well as for fighting.
His plan/goal is to go professional within two years and eventully win a UFA Championship belt. He said fighting doesn’t pay well to start with and shared the example of a friend who has gone professional, starting at 500-700/fight, now getting $12,000/fight plus prize money, but fighters can only fight every 3-4 months – $12,000 a fight sounds pretty rich, but really is not.
His message was stay positive and you will get through whatever is happening in your life.
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