Joaquin Buckley was ahead of the curve, but now he’s putting things into action before one of the most pivotal fights of his career.
Buckley faces Mike Malott in the main event of UFC Edmonton this Saturday in the promotion’s return to Canada. Buckley enters the bout on a two-fight skid and looks to get back on track, and is doing so with a bit more of a presence on social media.
“New Mansa” recently dropped a clip of a video on Instagram of him coaching up the “Herb Dean drill. While Buckley was happy to see referees during Saturday’s UFC Vegas 122 card take a couple of points away, he feels more needs to be done.
“I think it was just time to mention it, and plus, it’s a great, great drill, by the way,” Buckley told MMA Fighting. “So if you’re doing the drill, you can have multiple people or you can have just one or two guys, but the drill is to go back and forth. So once somebody gets in the bag pretty good, you try your best to get them off them, but you try your best to stay on the bag as well. It’s actually a fun drill. I’m not gonna lie. …
“[As far as Herb Dean and other refs go] I think it’s still some things that can change for sure, but I would just have to say, ‘What took so long?’”
A little over three years ago, as he was trying to get his UFC career further off the ground and move the needle, Buckley was seen at UFC Jacksonville in June 2023 shooting fun content with fans outside of the arena — even trying to sneak into the media entrance for the event. That footage was never released.
“I didn’t trust myself, you know what I mean?,” Buckley said. “I wasn’t confident within myself at the time of what I was doing and really trying to figure it out. I didn’t have a team at the time, like I didn’t have people like to really post it for me and stuff like that. You got a group of people that usually helps out with some of these guys that do it now and I didn’t have that at the time. It was really just solo dolo, and I just wanted it to catch and be honest with you, I still got those [old] footages that I can still pull out, which is dope.
“But I just have to say that I trust myself now. I believe in myself now. I’m not talking about no cage stuff, I’m talking about really just, authentically, giving my real personality out there to the world and really showing people who I am as an individual. And really, I mean, shoot man, I’m just a dude that loves to fight, love martial arts, and I thought about the best way to kind of, I guess, promote myself is through fighting alone. Fighting alone it’s just as easy as it gets, and I should’ve been doing this, like you said, years ago as I was doing.”
After putting himself in title contention following a win over Colby Covington in the main event of UFC Tampa in December 2024, Buckley dropped back-to-back decisions to Kamaru Usman and Sean Brady.
As he prepares for this big fight with Malott, Buckley finally made the decision to hop on the Kick streaming channel train, which is something he started just a few days ago.
So why now, and not when he seemed ahead of the game years back?
“No, no, no, that’s deep — I always wanted things to be perfect,” Buckley continues. “Let me say it like that. It didn’t look perfect to me, it didn’t sound good to me, it didn’t… whatever, so it was still me, obviously. But at the same time. I want it to be a certain type of way, but sometimes it ain’t gotta be a certain type of way. You just gotta do it. Like, shit, we’re just here right now, and people just listening to us. They don’t care about all the aesthetics. I thought people cared about the aesthetics because, you know, I love cinema, cinema, right? I love movies, so it’s like the aesthetics of the eye and like how the video needs to be shot.
“I thought about all those things and I was just like, it’s not good enough. So, yeah, I played myself.”
The 32-year-old Buckley faces Malott, a winner of four straight including victories over Kevin Holland and the recently-retired Gilbert Burns at April’s UFC Winnipeg card.
The newest member of the Kick fighters says he watched the likes of Quinton “Rampage” Jackson and King Green get their channels off the ground, and it inspired him, and showed proof of concept for his new channel.
“Yeah, everybody doing their thing and like I said, no disrespect to them,” Buckley explained. “They motivated me to do it, but I was like, if they can do it, I know I can, man. And I feel like I can have real purpose behind my content, not just making people laugh, [or] making people excited to see some cool drills or some workouts, but like actually change lives, man, with the content that I make, for real.”