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Strickland said he grew up around an abusive, alcoholic father, and a racist grandfather, so he gravitated toward similar behavior. It wasn’t until the first time Strickland walked into a gym as a kid that all his anger went away. Strickland felt happy for the first time in his life.
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“It’s fun,” Strickland said of fighting. “Everyday people wake up, they go to their eight-hour job, they sit in traffic, they buy s*** they don’t need, they buy s*** they don’t want. They’re told that if they don’t buy [a particular] car they aren’t worth it. We judge men by the value in their pocket and not the value inside them. And to me, I love fighting because it gives you money and allows you to live, but fighting is the last little bit of sanity for me in this world.
“Americans are all f***** up. We’re all fat, we all like to drink, we’re all depressed, we all sit on our phones, we all live on Amazon. MMA is the ultimate escape. You go to a gym, you’re surrounded by brothers, you bleed with your friends, you try to kill your friends. It is truly a little bit of humanity that we have left, that the corporations haven’t stripped from us.”