How family, wrestling got Johny Hendricks past injuries and heartbreak

Ask Johny Hendricks a meaningful question and he won't just tell you what's on his mind and in his heart. He'll probably show you.

Take, for example, his post-fight interview with Megan Olivi backstage (below) after his controversial decision loss to Georges St-Pierre (25-2) in November 2013.

Hendricks (16-2) appeared to have won at least four rounds of the five-round main event against the longtime welterweight king. However, when Bruce Buffer read the judges' scores, they gave the fight to GSP.

Afterwards, Hendricks defiantly said he felt he deserved to win, and couldn't help but wear his devastated emotions on his sleeve. "They ripped my heart out. It sucks," he said, getting a little choked up.

"(I've got to) go home, get better, you know . . . I don't really know how much better I can get, but that's the mystery."

Training and committing your life for years to reaching a certain point, then doing exactly what you had prepared to once you got your shot, only to fall short of your goal. It's the type of gutting experience that many athletes can't ever fully bounce back from.

Fortunately for Hendricks, he'd experienced that before. "It happened in my senior year in college," Hendricks told FOX Sports, when asked if he'd ever had such a disappointing experience prior to losing the St-Pierre fight.

"I lost my last match. When you think you're doing everything right and all of the sudden you lose, it's tough to come out of it. You can't explain why you lost or what you need to do different."

Yet, the two-time Division I national champion out of Oklahoma State did find something to do differently, upon further reflection. "I told myself I would never cut weight again, and that I was going to compete in something that wasn't as hard, from then on out," he remembers with a chuckle.

"Now, I fight for a living," he said and laughed. "That's a pretty hard sport, you know? It all just goes back to trying to figure out what I could have done different.

"That's sort of what I did with the GSP fight. I asked, 'Why did this happen? What could I do differently?' We changed up camp a little bit, and it ended up working out. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger. I believe in God, and he's not going to put something in front of you that you can't handle."

Hendricks found perspective in some unlikely sources after that loss. Though he says he usually isn't one for reading Internet posts from fans, in his desperation to figure out how the judges could have given the fight to GSP, "Bigg Rigg" read fan comments and opinion pieces in the media.

"I re-watched the fight and couldn't see how they scored it for him so I started to go on the Internet and read what everybody thought, what everybody said. I don't read that stuff all the time, but you can learn a lot about how people see things, what the judges could have seen, by reading that," he said.

"I saw people say that the fifth round was really my bad round. So, we decided to train harder for the fifth rounds, to be able to go stronger at the end. I think that's what pushed us to where we're at now."

Indeed, in his very next fight, Hendricks again had to go five championship rounds, this time against Robbie Lawler (24-10) at UFC 171 last spring in one of the closest and most violently fought UFC title contests in history. The fight appeared to be an even two rounds apiece for each man, heading into the fifth round.

That's when Hendricks turned it on and forced the judges to give him what he believed he'd earned months ago: the UFC welterweight championship. Hendricks not only became more effective in the final round, but he also managed to do so with a biceps muscle torn earlier in the fight.

In fact, Hendricks first injured his arm about 10 days before his hometown Dallas main event against Lawler. However, it never occurred to him to postpone the fight due to his injury.

"We did not think about pulling out," he said.

"You just sit there and think, 'This is a main event. We're in Dallas. Yeah, this is going to suck, but hopefully we can find a way to win.' "

It ended up sucking a lot worse than he could have imagined. "We were planning on going for the takedown in the first round," he remembered.

"And that's when it went. [The biceps] completely blew out."

In between rounds, Hendricks whispered into the ear of his coach Marc Laimon and told him that his arm was out of commission. The Jiu Jitsu black belt prodded him onward.

"My arm was shot. Gone. I asked him what I should do. He said, 'Just continue what you're doing. There's nothing you can do about it. Nothing.' So, I thought, OK, there's nothing to do about the arm, let's see if we can still do this."

Once more, Hendricks' lifetime of wrestling experience helped him get past adversity in the Octagon. "I just couldn't believe it," he recounted.

"I'm in the cage, I'm injured. What do you do? How do you overcome that? How do you take that? That's what I asked myself. The first thing that came to mind was, wrestling. I thought about how many times I'd wrestled and had to overcome injuries while you're in the match. I just thought, How do I block it out? That was most important.

"By the third round, it hurt to parry and throw punches. My defense really fell down. If you watch the fight, the first two rounds, my hands are somewhat up. The third round, they start to fall. By the fourth round, they are almost to my waist. By the fifth round, they are at my waist."

With his pain worse and his right arm less functional than ever, heading into the final round, Hendricks simply focused on how crucial the fifth stanza was, and forged ahead. "I thought I won the first two rounds, and I knew he won the second two, so it came down to the fifth round," he said.

Hendricks kept on swinging, eventually rocking Lawler with punches, which he said made the takedown easier. That wrestling cinched the round and fight on the scorecards for the Team Takedown blue-chipper.

Finally, Hendricks heard the title ". . . and new UFC welterweight champion" next to his name, in the official decision announcement. In the difficult minutes of the fifth round, when his own energy was at its lowest, and his head was rocked from the many monster shots he'd absorbed, Hendricks said he had one constant image in his mind: his family.

After a lifetime of high-level wrestling, nearly seven years of pro MMA, 17 fights and countless injuries, Hendricks saw his wife and children in his mind's eye and knew he couldn't let one more injury stop him from achieving what they'd all worked for. "I just saw my wife and kids," he said.

"When I went out there in the fifth, I thought of them, and all we've done, and knew I had to bring it home for them. When it hurt, when I was tired, when I thought the fight could go the other way, I thought of them, and knew I couldn't let it happen that way."

Hendricks defends his UFC welterweight title in a rematch against Lawler this Saturday, Dec. 6 in Las Vegas at UFC 181.