Christian Morecraft: "I Feel I Can Go All the Way in This Sport"

In his youth, Christian Morecraft was never sure what he wanted to one day do for a living.

In his early 20s, Morecraft was introduced to the world of mixed martial arts. Although he wasn’t sure if he would—or could—pursue the sport as a career-option when he first started training, Morecraft was nevertheless passionate about mixed martial arts from the very beginning.

“I used to go lift weights at the gym and one of these kids was like, ‘Hey, you should give grappling a try,’” Morecraft, 25, recently told Bleacher Report. “I did and I just got into it, man. I really liked the challenge—I really liked everything about it. So, yeah, you could say that (I’ve been passionate about the sport since the beginning).”

Conversely, it didn’t take long for Morecraft to excel as a mixed martial artist—although he by no means thought that he would come this far this quickly.

“Everyone always told me that I could make it to the UFC,” explained Morecraft, who won his first six professional matches. “A lot of these guys have been wrestling and kickboxing for years, but I really just had the size to overcome a lot of that. I’ll tell you one thing, when I started out, I never thought that I would be in the UFC four or five years later.”

“I didn’t really know (if I would excel in this sport),” Morecraft, who made his UFC-debut in August of 2010, said. “It just kept going and going and I’ve always just taken it one fight at a time, really.”

Now that Morecraft is in the UFC, he isn’t taking his time in “the show” for granted.

“Fighting in the UFC really means a lot to me,” Morecraft explained. “Fighting in the UFC is a huge honor. There are a lot of men that have tried to make it to this level and everything just happened to fall into place with me. It’s a big honor to me, man. I’m trying to stay focused and do the right things here and work as hard as I can to come out with as many wins as I can.”

Not surprisingly, now that Morecraft, who is to return to the Octagon against Pat Barry at UFC on FX: Guillard vs. Miller in January, is this far in the sport, he has found what he wants to focus on for the foreseeable future.

“I feel I can go all the way in this sport,” said Morecraft. “I’d like to fight for as long as I can. It’s awesome ... I obviously don’t want to be doing this when I’m 60—because you can’t—but I want to do this for as long as I can.”