SERVING UP SELF-CARE | SLOANE STEPHENS
As we close out 2022, we're already thinking about what we're going to do in the New Year personally and professionally! In the midst of all this activity, we need to take time and to enjoy the moments along the way!
This month's cover is Grand Slam US Open 2017 Champion, Sloane Stephens. She has made impressive moments at the French Open, Australian Open, Wimbledon and a number of matches and won an ESPY for Top Female Tennis Player in 2018 and because of her philanthropic work with the Sloane Stephens Foundation, she was nominated and a finalist for the Muhammad Ali Sports Humanitarian Award in 2019.
We have had the pleasure to connect with her in previous issues, but this month, we're talking about her upcoming tennis season, self-care and what she does while traveling! She definitely knows a thing or two about juggling a busy schedule while also taking the necessary time that she needs.
ATHLEISURE MAG: We had the pleasure of interviewing a few years back and then right before the US Open, you took time out of your schedule to share your 63MIX ROUTIN3S with us about what you do Morning, Afternoon and Night. With the season starting Jan 1st, what are the weeks like for you between now and the start of the season whether it’s training, relaxing, enjoying the holiday season, etc?
SLOANE STEPHENS: I’ve had one of the best off-seasons I’ve ever had this year! I started out by freezing my eggs at Kindbody. I’ve wanted to freeze my eggs for a while and the timing was finally right to commit to the process. From there, we went to Iceland to celebrate Jozy’s birthday and spent a few days as a family at the Retreat Hotel at the Blue Lagoon getting spa treatments and soaking in the hot springs. Iceland is only a 5 hour nonstop flight from Boston, so it was an easy trip! The day after Thanksgiving, we left for Africa. We went on the most incredible safari in South Africa at Londolozi and saw a gorilla trek at Virunga National Park. This was my first trip to Africa and I cannot wait to go back. I’m now back in Boston doing a training block with my trainer before heading for a tennis training block in Cabo through Christmas. From Cabo, I’ll fly directly to Auckland, NZ to begin the season!
AM: What tournaments are you looking forward to this year?
SS: Red clay is my favorite surface, so I always look forward to the European clay court season in the spring, which culminates at Roland Garros. As an American, any time I can play on US soil is extra special, so I’m looking forward to playing at Indian Wells, Miami, the US Open, and a new tournament in Austin.
AM: What is your routine before and after your matches?
SS: Before I play, I usually eat some pasta and a piece of lean protein like a chicken breast or piece of fish. I typically go into the locker room and put my headphones in and spend some time thinking and mentally going over the match plan I outlined with my coach the night before. About 30 minutes before my match, I’ll break a light sweat on a stationary bike and go through some fitness drills to make sure I’m starting the match with quick feet and dynamic movement.
After the match, I’ll do a quick cool down and shower before handling any mandatory media commitments. Once I’m done with that, I’ll either get a massage on-site or go back to my hotel and get some treatment from my physio. Depending on the time of day, I’ll then head out to dinner and prepare for the next day.
AM: How important is recovery to you after working out or after a match? What are the kinds of things that you do after these activities?
SS: Recovery is a critical piece of both the fitness and recovery process. Cooling down and taking the time to stretch and flush out muscles is really important for recovery and preparing for the next day and next match.
AM: Many of our readers are balancing hectic schedules – you got married at the top of the year to Jozy Altidore, an international soccer star – how do you make sure you give time to yourself, being with your husband and family?
SS: I make a lot of effort to have a very structured schedule and communicate my boundaries and commitments to my team. When it’s family time, it is family time and the phone is away. When it’s time to train, I’m training. When it’s time to work on my Foundation or on my outside businesses and investments, I’m fully there. I’ve also learned the things that bring me the most joy and fulfillment and prioritize those activities. When I’m home and able to spend time with my family, I take advantage of every single second of that time we’re together.
AM: In your sport, you spend a lot of time traveling 40+ weeks of the year! You kick off the season in Australia with the Australian Open. Also via your IG feed, you travel for fun – you’re South African trip looks amazing! How do you make your spaces feel like home when you’re traveling?
SS: I try to keep some consistent products and activities in my routine so that I can rely on those consistencies no matter where I am. A super easy way to do this is with bringing a candle from home - I find that having the same scent is really grounding and helps me feel in control of my environment.
AM: When it comes to choosing what hotel you like to stay at and to help our readers that may be planning their next trip, what are the things that you look for?
SS: For most tournaments, there is an official tournament hotel, so I just stay wherever I need to. In some cases, like in Paris and New York where there are endless options, we get to pick our own hotels. I love to stay at The Langham in New York and Hotel Vernet in Paris. I love when a hotel has a good breakfast, it’s just one less decision to make in the day. I also love great showers and friendly concierges.
AM: In terms of your suitcase, what are some of the important things that are must for you to pack so that you have your necessities as well as options for the unexpected?
SS: The most important thing in my suitcase is my passport. If I have my passport, I can pretty much figure everything else out as I go! Of course, I also need my tennis racquets to do my job! I travel with a lot of skin care products because I love the sense of calm and order that a consistent routine brings.
AM: What are some of your travel hacks that have proven to work for you that we should know?
SS: I cannot overstate the importance of hydrating during travel. The entire travel experience is really drying - the plane air is dry, hotels can be dry, the change in climates can be tough - it’s a lot. Hydrating inside and out helps your body adjust to new situations and new timezones and it is so simple to do. I think a lot of people are hit with a double-whammy when it comes to dehydration because they’re drinking a lot of caffeine to try and stay awake during travel or they might be having some alcoholic beverages while they’re away, and both of those things are also really dehydrating on the body, so it’s all the more important to hydrate.
AM: Do you have anything that you do before, during or after hopping on a flight whether it’s a beauty process, self-care, etc?
SS: I’ve started wearing WHOOP’s new Blue Light Glasses to avoid disrupting my circadian rhythms with too much screen time - it makes a huge difference when I’m trying to sleep the next night. I also try to get up and walk around on the plane to keep the blood flowing and prevent blood clots or feeling super stiff when I land.
AM: When you arrive in your designated city, whether it’s for work or fun, what are the things that you look for in terms of restaurants, activities and shopping that you want to explore?
SS: When I was first starting out on tour, I rarely ventured out. I stuck close to the hotel and always went back to the same restaurants. There are already so many variables at play when traveling for work and needing to compete, so I never wanted to risk an upset stomach or having any sort of issues. Now that I’ve been traveling to the same cities for 15+ years, I have a great mix of my tried and true staple spots but have also really enjoyed researching and trying new spots. I think being locked down during Covid made me appreciate the incredible opportunity I have to travel the world and made me look forward to getting back out and exploring.
AM: Do you have separate beauty routines for daytime versus night time?
SS: Yes! I wake up and drink a huge glass of water. I brush my teeth and then wash my face with a gentle cleanser like the iS Clinical Cleansing Complex. I sleep with various moisturizing layers, so I don’t want to take that all off and dry myself out again. I usually head right to practice or training, so I put Neutrogena sunscreen on my face and sometimes I’ll use the Dr. Barbara Sturm Anti-Pollution Drops under my sunscreen. I sweat pretty much every day and am always wearing sunscreen, so I like to do a body scrub in the shower at night to scrub that all away and feel like I’m going to bed super clean. For the record, I love piping hot showers, the hottest the dial will turn - boil me!! After I get out of the shower, I layer on the moisturizers - I start with a lotion and then will layer a body oil on top if I’m feeling extra ashy in certain spots. I go through the same routine every day and it helps my body and mind recognize that it is time to start unwinding and preparing for bed. None of the products I use at night have any energizing scents like eucalyptus or lemon verbena - it’s all fragrance free. If I want a relaxing scent, I’ll turn on a diffuser or light a candle. I always travel with diffusers or candles.
AM: How important is mental health and self-care to your training and state of being whether you’re working in your sport or just being out and about?
SS: There is an undeniable link between mental health and physical well-being. Both parts have to be working in harmony. Tennis as a sport inherently requires a lot of mental energy - it’s just you out there and everyone is looking at you, so I find that taking care of my mental health is just as important as how I take care of my body. It is encouraging to see this sort of discourse make its way into more mainstream conversations and I hope that more people are encouraged to find the practices, tools, and therapies that help them.
AM: Why does the wellness space mean so much to you and what can you tell us about your new brand that you are launching next year as we know you may not be able to say too much!
SS: The wellness space is so important to me as both an athlete and as a woman. I've always loved to try new products and am constantly in pursuit of the best ways to take care of my skin and body. I will be venturing into the wellness space myself next year, so stay tuned!
AM: We know how important The Sloane Stephens Foundation is to you. Are there new projects or initiatives that you are focused on that you would like to share?
SS: Thank you for asking! The Sloane Stephens Foundation is actually celebrating our 10 year anniversary in March 2023 - I cannot believe it’s been 10 years! I wanted to use tennis as the vehicle to keep kids in school, keep them healthy, and keep them physically safe. Tennis has given me so much in my life but I know that it can feel very unapproachable, especially to people from under-resourced communities who might not be able to afford the equipment or coaching, or to underrepresented communities where they might not see a lot of players that look like them. I sought out to change that. We work with over 15,000 kids each year across the Compton Unified School District and provide tennis, academic, mental health, and financial literacy programs. One of the things I’m most proud of us that almost all of our coaches are actually graduates of our programs who have decided to come on as staff members while they pursue their college degrees. It’s very much a big family and it feels very sustainable to have programs designed and implemented by the community and for the community.
PHOTOGRAPHY CREDITS | FRONT COVER + BACK COVER, PG 28 9DRIP Courtesy of Sloane Stephens | PG 16 - 19, 22 + PG 82 9PLAYLIST BNP Paribas Open | PG 21 John Cordes/Icon Sportswire | PG 25 Masha Maltsava | PG 26 Federico Pestellini/Panoramic/Icon Sportswire |
Read the DEC ISSUE #84 of Athleisure Mag and see SERVING UP SELF-CARE | Sloane Stephens in mag.
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THE ARTIST | TYRON WOODLEY
This month's cover is 5X UFC Welterweight Champion Tyron Woodley. With an impressive career, we delve into this athlete and artist who got his start wrestling and went on to continue in this sport at the University of Missouri and are a 2x All-American and Big 12 Conference Champion. In addition to the impact that he has created in MMA, he is also an analyst. When he is not in or talking about the Octagon, Tyron has acted in a number of films and movies including Straight Outta Compton, Kickboxer: Vengence and Hawaii Five-0. He has also been involved in stunts in Olympus Has Fallen, Once Upon a Time in Venice and has trained actors such as Denzel Washington in The Equalizer 2.
We talk with him about he got into MMA, his passion for it, his creativity in entertainment, the music industry and more.
ATHLEISURE MAG: My favorite sport is boxing and through that it brought me to enjoying MMA as well. I’ve been a fan of yours for a number of years. What was the moment when you realized that you wanted to be an athlete as I know that in highschool you played football as well as wrestled. What initially drew you to wrestling as you were NCAA Division I collegiate wrestler at the University of Missouri and are a 2X All-American and Big 12 Conference Champion.
TYRON WOODLEY: I mean, just as a kid, I started off just being outside and in a regular neighborhood to play. We didn’t have a ton of funds to go on a billion vacations and trips and all those extracurricular activities and things. So it came down to racing people in the streets first, who was the fastest and who could do the most push-ups. Naturally, when it came to wrestling, I kind of gravitated towards sports that were more economical. For wrestling, you don’t need a lot of stuff for that. It’s very affordable, so I kind of started to do that and I didn’t even notice that I was doing that. I also just enjoy the difficulty of doing stuff and I don’t even know why. Especially growing up as a kid, if there was something that was difficult that I could do, it made me feel a certain kind of way and I liked it.
That’s kind of the journey that I have been towards - I don’t want to say the impossible because other people have done it, but the things that seem to be very difficult and people veer away from it, I go straight to it.
AM: So how did being a wrestler eventually merge to you focusing on being a Mixed Martial Artist?
TW: I mean when I was wrestling, I was doing that and I was also trying to out amateur MMA just to see if I liked it. I’ve always wanted to box, but I felt as if at 23 years old, which was the age that I graduated from college, I felt that I was too old to start boxing. At that age, most people that are successful have started since they were 18 or 19 years old. I felt that with Mixed Martial Arts, I could punch, wrestle and do a couple of other things too. I was giving it a try but what really crossed me over the edge was that I was the #1 wrestling coach for the top fighters. Everybody that had a big fight against wrestlers – The Ultimate Fighter show 1, 2 and 3 and really it brought a shit load of Division 1 level wrestlers into MMA Rashad Evans, Gray Maynard, Josh Koscheck – all of these different guys you’ve seen from that show. The mindset of a wrestler amongst any other martial arts was just so different – it was really kind of meat head and really a bar that was set that nobody had really done to get there. With that mindset, they became really good MMA fighters because of drilling – we drill so many moves thousands of times. We’ll do the same leg and then we’ll do a variation of it and based on his defense we do this and if he does that then we’ll do this. It made it easier because it was a mindset that we use anyway. It’s one of the few sports where we had to cut weight year around which got us ready for MMA and it was natural as I was already doing those things.
AM: When you say MMA, what disciplines are involved in that when you’re fighting and what are you looking to add to your skillset in your journey?
TW: For MMA, Mixed Martial Arts, it’s really any form of martial art excluding fish hooks, head butts, striking of the groin, kicking someone when they’re down. Outside of that, karate, judo, wrestling, jiu-jitsu, boxing, Muay Thai, kickboxing – every form of striking, every form of grappling, Sambo – all these different things, there are different places where you can use them in the Octagon. There’s a lot of Greco-Roman wrestling in judo when you’re against the cage in the area that we call “the clinch” – striking out in the open and now you don’t have to just punch – you can punch, kick, slip, roll, knee, elbow – you can pretty much use your entire body minus your forehead to fight.
You have to be up to date on what’s the new techniques, what the new training camps are learning so you know how to prepare, who you’re going against and what they bring to the table. So I just looked at my wrestling background and said, “hey, I’m going to be able to take most of these guys down,” because I’m the head coach of most of the guys that are trying to stop from being taken down. If I spend 85% of my time on striking and you can’t out strike me and you’re supposed to be a striker and you can’t out wrestle me and I can get up and be in good shape, you’re going to have a hard time defeating me. That was my formula for many, many years and it was proven, because I didn’t lose a round and I hardly lost any minutes in any round. It’s basically a game plan that I ended up using and it worked out.
AM: For those that are not familiar, what are the rules of the sport and how is someone designated the winner?
TW: The rule of the sport is that you start to fight on your feet and usually both of the fighters are in their corner and from that position, the referee will tell them that they are ready to fight. Basically, they’ll say, “let’s get it cracking, you guys get it on,” or whatever they say. These referees ref so many fights that they start having a familiar face and people are starting to associate them with their ad lib to start the fight.
You start on your feet and what you see first is mostly striking because that’s what people do when they’re on their feet - punching, kicking, knee and elbow. But anytime people get close enough, it’s allowed to grab the person, slam them down, grapple them, cement a few arm locks, chokes, pressure points or utilize your elbows. You can put somebody in a move that causes someone to submit which means that they don’t want to do that move anymore and they can’t get out of it and they submit to you or give up.
Then there’s scoring. The judges are looking throughout the rounds because sometimes it’s not finished by submission, a knockout or disqualification – they’re looking at who is the aggressor, who’s landing power; who’s persistent, who’s pressing the pace – from there, they will deem who they have seen from that round. Who won that round and then who won the next round – they look at all the rounds and add it up to decide who actually won the fight. It’s kind of confusing because the sport hit by storm and many people were not ready for it. You have to remember that there isn’t a MMA judge! It’s really a boxing commission that are judging these fights. When you look at it that way, some boxing commissioners aren’t even familiar with what they are even looking at because they are not familiar with martial arts. They don’t understand that if I’m a D1 wrestler and I’m All American and a striker and you hook me down, I would weight that more as a bigger deal than if I have to take him down. So that’s the way how I feel that it should be judged, but I’m not trying to be the judge and the fighter at the same time. I just have to let it go as it goes.
AM: That’s an interesting point that you made as I wasn’t thinking about that. Is it difficult for you knowing that as you’re going in that there are judges that aren’t into the details of your sport, but they are literally judging what you’re doing?
TW: Yeah I mean, it’s difficult, but like I told you before, I have been blessed to have some good friends. Lin Oeding (Reacher, Cobra Kai, Warrior), a fighting/stunt coordinator/performer and who is a director now, he kind of gave me his mindset because he’s good at analyzing issues that come up with good solutions. He said, “Tyron, if you train this way (in the formula that I told you), you’re going to be hard to beat.” Luckily for me, even though my background was grappling, wrestling, jiu-jitsu and the last thing that I started to do was striking, I was one of the best strikers and one of the most explosive strikers. I would use the fact that people were so scared of my ability to take them down - that it actually made them tense up a little bit. Then I would be able to sneak in and make it look like I was going to be able to take a shot when they responded to do that by lowering their hands or getting intimidated, then I would just come up and punch them in the face.
AM: You began your career in Strikeforce and you’re a 5 X UFC Welterweight Champion, can you talk about what it means to have such an amazing career of 19 wins you only have 7 losses and a draw – it’s great stats.
TW: For me, it was always to try to be the best. Everybody else wanted to participate or to just get to the UFC or to win a title. Because, when you win a title, no one can ever say that you’re not a champion – you’re a champion. But my goal wasn’t just to win 1 title, it was to be the best. By definition, the best is somebody that gets a title and defends it multiple times and makes it very difficult to be beaten and that was my motivation. I accomplished that and obviously, life has highs and lows sometimes you don’t understand how things go, but it’s not really for us to understand. I just use it as a learning curve to keep getting better and to create my legacy.
AM: What is a normal week like for you when you’re in the gym training. You must be doing the most insane workouts and spending many hours to be where you’re at!
TW: You know, I used to do that when I was younger by spending many, many hours. You need to know if you can do it. You need to see if you’re built for it because what you don’t want to do is to waste their time or to waste your time.
This ain’t a sport where you do all of this hard work and you don’t know if it’s right for you. It’s too hard and there are great chances where you can get hurt. If you find out early in your career that you strike on somebody and they hit you in the face and you didn’t like it, shit maybe it ain’t up for you. If you don’t deal with pressure well, if you’re learning curve isn’t up to par with the growth of the sport, you have to look at yourself and say, “hey, you know what – maybe I should be a coach or I should be alongside it or I should do it for leisure but not put all my ducks in a row.” Some fighters think that just because they decided that they were going to give up the rest of their life towards this that they should be a pro fighter. That’s not how it works.
AM: Can we expect to see you in an upcoming MMA fight and who would you like to fight?
TW: I want to fight big fights. I don’t want to fight any small fights. Right now I feel like, if I beat 5 - 10 super high level guys and get a world title again that don’t mean shit. That’s not going to make me anymore of a great. I had to talk to God about this. I wanted to do that. I wanted to go back and get my belt back - it's the ego. Because, that's not my belt. That’s the current person’s belt, they earned their belt and I lost my belt. They didn’t take my belt, they earned theirs. Once people start thinking about it that way, his blessings are not mine and mine is not his. So, me going back and trying to chase that down – something that I have already done is kind of ego. So I had to check myself and now I just want to fight to make myself happy, to make a lot of money and to make a big fuss and a lot of exposure and a lot of media and buildup and marketing and big endorsements – big exposure and everything is leading me towards another area of martial arts.
AM: How much influence do you have when it comes to setting up matches. Are you able to select or at least propose who you want to go against? How does that process work?
TW: In the UFC, I didn’t really get much of a say so. If I did a couple of favors and I particularly wanted to fight somebody and they felt that it made sense and they could see how that looked good marketing-wise, then it became a yes. It was always if this person that I wanted to fight, made sense for them as well, then we’d do it. If it didn’t, then there was no chance. There were many times when it didn’t make sense for me to fight in my career, that they didn’t care and they wanted that fight to happen. Right now, I’m in a different position. Today, I was offered a fight, my first question was what’s the weight, where’s it at and are we at 7 figures and up?
AM: Ok now.
TW: Yeah why wouldn’t I?
AM: It’s interesting as I’ve always been interested in how these matches come together and it’s great that you’re able to have the ability to set those standards and parameters.
Why were you interested in boxing as you have had 2 fights against Jake Paul and will you continue to box?
TW: Yeah I’m going to continue to box and I was interested in boxing before the Jake Paul fight. I told my manager that I just really wanted to focus on doing all forms of combat and becoming an actual real free agent. Not having to conform to an organization that says that I have to fight at a certain time and I’m not saying that that didn’t benefit me and I don’t have no smoke with UFC. I’m not trying to get time back. I did what I was supposed to do in the time that I was given and I created some mystery so now I’m in a position where I want big fights that excite me and makes me want to walk out there! Because, for the longest, I was doing it to prove people wrong. I felt like at certain points, I was doing it to prove naysayers wrong, the organization wrong, the fighters wrong and the haters wrong. That’s too many people to be doing that with. I’d rather focus on just proving my people right and my coaches right versus all that other stuff.
AM: You’re also an analyst and it’s always good to watch a sport and see someone who comes from it who does it being able to tell you what’s going on. What do you enjoy about being in this role?
TW: I think it’s that people get to see me in a different light. They don’t get to see the quiet or the outspoken because I’m never in between! I feel like when I needed to, I was quiet because people didn’t deserve to really get to know me for who I was because everything was just so fake to me. It was like everything was such a façade and I wasn’t used to that. In St. Louis, it’s all about respect, all about being real and I’m just not used to people doing things that everybody else is doing because it looks cool. That was really corny to me and so at times, I didn’t feel like I fit in. So the analyst desk gave me a way to express myself, to say how I see the sport, make it realistic for someone that has never watched it and just make it fun and make it where it’s a moment that they will remember and tie them into our sport. We need more fans and more supporters and the way to do that, is to tell more people about it. Sometimes, as an analyst, you’re teaching people about MMA and they don’t know about it until you tell them.
AM: Exactly, I live in NY, but am originally from Indiana so I definitely understand the sensibilities of growing up in the Midwest and then when you go outside of it, it’s a different cadence that you have to get used to.
TW: Very interesting, very interesting. If you came from Indiana to NY, you understand exactly what I’m saying. It’s fast paced, no one is really caring about anything you’re saying as they’re focused on what they need to do and in the back of their mind, they’re trying to position themselves and posture. I’m not trying to do that. If you’re cool with me, you’re cool with me – if not, you can slide.
AM: In addition to everything that you’re doing, you’re also an actor and a stuntman. I remember watching you in Straight Outta Compton and I was like, “wait, he’s acting?” I know you’ve done other roles as well, why have you embraced this portion of the entertainment industry in your body of work?
TW: I’m just an artist. I’ve said it to a lot of people and they don’t even realize it. I’m just an artist. I’m not a boxer, I’m not a fighter, I’m not a rapper, I’m not an analyst – I’m an artist. Whatever canvas I have to paint on for that day, I have to do what I have to do. So that’s why I think of it and I separate it. My filter when I had my own TMZ show was different than when I do FOX, is different then when I act. Again in acting, there are a whole lot of different roles – so I do that differently. Music is a different look and it’s just different filters that you use and sensors. Sometimes there’s no filters and it’s very encouraging for you to be 100% yourself. But they all exist because you're an artist.
So, I feel like that we as humans try to box people in because we’re afraid that someone else will want us to be something more. If you’re comfortable being a 5th grade high school teacher, you don’t want somebody out there over doing it making you feel like you need to get down and get into crypto, to build some real estate developments and to look into these areas. There are people that don’t want to do that. So that’s why they allow the 1% to tell them what to do and to tell them what’s cool.
AM: As someone who is an artist, what are some things that you have coming up that you can share as you have your hands in various pots.
TW: I have an EP that I’m working on musically, I have a TV show that I’m writing, executive producing and starring in which is my main focus. I will fight 2 more times this year one time will be boxing and the other will be MMA. I haven’t confirmed it, but if I can get this last fight of the year on NYE, then it will literally turn a lot of heads. I’m just in to doing stuff that’s ground breaking, trailblazing and when people try to tell you that you can’t do something, I’m trying to be a living vessel to show you that you can and to tell everyone else that they can shut up!
AM: How do you take time for yourself when you’re not in the midst of doing all of these projects?
TW: I just started doing that! So I took up golf and I’m just about to go play golf in Hawaii right now! The first time golfing, I was in Hawaii, my second time golfing – I was in Hawaii and now today, I’m taking my son out in the jungle where they filmed parts of Jurassic Park – we’re going to go out there. I like shooting guns and getting a haircut. Like, I’m really into getting a haircut and I don’t know why.
AM: How do you give back to your community and how important is that?
TW: I give back to my community and I would go to schools and talk to them and encourage them and showing them somebody that came up from a similar background or similar complexion could make it. A lot of kids used to message me and said they were from the same area that I grew up in and they wanted to know how I made it out of there. One in particular told me how he was getting bullied to join a gang and he didn’t want to. I was real with him and told him that I joined – it wasn’t because I was scared, but I didn’t want to have to deal with people asking me questions every day like which gang I was in. So, I did it because of that and I told this kid that he shouldn’t do it. He was a freshman in high school when he reached out and now he is a Senior, a kid named Cameron a D1 athlete with a scholarship and he made it out. So, I can do that and inspire others – obviously me going out there and doing well and winning is the best thing that I can do. Unfortunately, people don’t understand that the real life is not about whether you got the most points in regulation or what the judges are saying – it’s about how you live. You’re a champion because of the way that you live not because of the title or the belt, you know what I mean? That’s my thing to go out there and show you better and to tell you.
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PHOTO CREDIT | FRONT COVER + PG 50 9DRIP Jeff Bottari/Getty Images | PG 16, 20, 24 UFC/Getty Images | PG 18 + BACK COVER Josh Hedges/UFC/Getty Images | PG 23 Eric Lars Bakke/ESPN Images | PG 27 Art Streiber/NBC | PG 28 - 33 Byron Cohen/ABC |
Read the MAR ISSUE #75 of Athleisure Mag and see THE ARTIST | Tyron Woodley in mag.
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