Godzilla is coming to Hamburg: UFC newcomer talks debut in German

It wasn’t that long ago that new heavyweight fighters in the UFC weren’t just a rarity, they were practically unheard of. While much of the UFC roster has ballooned over the past 7-8 years, the promotion’s heavyweight division remained a strangely stagnant place until only recently. If there was any new talent to be got during that time it was almost invariably a leftover Strikeforce, Pride, or other longtime regional veteran talent who had somehow managed to avoid Zuffa’s radar. Those days, it seems, are over.

Over the past couple years, the UFC’s big man division has undergone a renaissance in its lower ranks. No longer the era of picking up undersized longtime vets, the UFC has scraped the global MMA landscape for all the relatively untested rising talent they can find. One of the men caught up in that new wave is making his debut this weekend at UFC Hamburg. His name is Christian Colombo.

“Godzilla” as he is also known, is a 6’ 5”, 260 lb Danish fighter with an 8-1 record. He’s set to take his first UFC fight against Jarjis Danho on the under card of UFC Hamburg. Colombo sat down with Bloody Elbow to talk about his journey into MMA, and his expectations now that he’s hit the UFC:

“Because this is the funnest thing in the world,” Colombo exclaimed, when asked why in the world he’d chose MMA. “Actually, I love it. I just love it. I’ve always competed in sports and ever since I was a little kid, always been in team sports. I used to play soccer, because it’s real big in Denmark and I used to play handball… If you even know what that is? It’s not that big in the states, right? But I played that and I played basketball and I played ping pong and I played badminton and stuff like that. I’ve been around. At one point I got tired of always finding excuses of why other guys didn’t perform. So, if you lost a game, it wasn’t always just my fault. And then I went into the MMA scene and I was decent, I was pretty good. It worked for me.

“I was coming off a tour of duty in Iraq, where I played around with one of the guys I lived with down there… We played some MMA and we played a little Jiu Jitsu and boxing and stuff like that. And then we got to a club in Denmark and just went from there on. Competed a little bit in grappling and then had my first amateur fight.”

Colombo is a career military man and while a transition from the regimented life of a soldier to that of a combat sports athlete seems like a natural fit, it’s not his only plan for the future:

“I’m a 10-year veteran of the army. So, I’ve been there 10-years and now I’ve moved on. At the moment I’m working in juvenile hall. I’m working with criminal kids. That’s the thing I do part time. If I don’t get the big success in the MMA and then I can start up a gym afterwards, that way I’ll still be in the game. That’s probably the way I’ll go.”

“You could do that,” Colombo replied, when asked if he’d use his MMA gym as a way to reach at-risk youth, “but again I just had a talk with one of the guys I work with and he said, ‘Do you want to be that guy who teaches the kids how to fight? So, when they get out on the street they can actually fight?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not that guy. I’m not gonna use…’ If there comes a kid and he says, ‘I really… I could get something out of kickboxing, Jiu Jitsu, or MMA, or whatever.’ Lets see how tough he is. And if he means it, if he wants to train, then I’ll show him. But if he doesn’t, like if he just wants to fight on the street? Hell no, I ain’t gonna show nobody nothin’. They can go out and get their own experience.”

The experience Colombo is bringing with him to the cage is something of a quick run. Despite being 36, the Danish fighter only really got his pro-MMA career going in earnest back in 2012, fighting four times that year and three the next, before being sidelined by a knee injury. Since his recovery, he had just one return bout before getting his UFC call-up:

“I’ve been talking to some guys,” Colombo replied, when asked about whether he expected to get called to the UFC so early in his career. “As you know, and as you wrote, I’ve been out for some time with a knee injury. Of course, after I had six fights in a year and I won five of them, of course I thought that would be the time they sign me. If they sign me, that would probably be the time. But they didn’t and somewhere around summer of last year I started talking to different managers.

“ A couple of guys approached me and said ‘We can get you in the UFC.’ And I said, ‘Okay, fine. If you can get me to the UFC, get me to the UFC.’ But I hadn’t fought in two years. So this RAW Sports Entertainment they contacted the other fighter I’m working with and they said, ‘We want you to go to Japan and fight.’ And he said, ‘I’m not ready right now.’ And I got out there instead, stopped the guy pretty quick, and got back in the game. Then a couple months ago they contacted me again and said, ‘We can get you in. Let’s do this Hamburg card and get you in that way.’ On my part, it’s one of those things that makes sense. I’ve got an 8-1 record, I’m on a six fight winning streak, I’m a Dane, I live six hours away from Hamburg. And they’ve got a big German guy they wanted on the card. It makes sense. And also there are two Danish guys, a couple of Swedes, a Norwegian guy on the card. It makes a lot of sense to promote that card that way for me. So you get the entire Scandinavian crowd down for the fights. I probably think that’s one of the reasons they signed me.”

As part of the new wave of ‘big men’ in the UFC, Colombo has kept a close eye on division he’s about to dive into. And he feels that while it may be a bigger pool of talent to navigate than before, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It could also mean more favorable match-ups in the early going.

“I think it’s better for the fighters,” Colombo said, when asked about the UFC’s expanding ranks, “at least some of us. Of course there’s always going to be the bottom of the barrel and there’s going to be the middle part and there’s gonna be the top contenders and there’s gonna be the champions. Right now you’ve got a top ten who’s… I think they can pretty much wipe out everybody else. And then there’s the 10s-20s, where I feel I can compete with a couple of those guys. And then the 20s-30s; I can definitely compete. But yeah, I saw, wasn’t it the Rotterdam show or something like that? Where they had five heavyweight fights on, or something like that? I was watching, and there was nobody in those five fights – I think it was the Croatia fight, or whatever – except for the main event. I was thinking, ‘Dude, I could definitely hang here.’ And those guys didn’t do anything to majorly impress me.”

And while some of these new heavyweights may not have impressed Colombo for their skill, he does feel he’s got a good grasp of why the UFC is picking them up:

“They’re bringing in heavyweights,” Colombo said, “not guys who can, with six months of training, go down to light heavy. Now, they’re bringing in heavyweights. I think one of those things is that they want to get that knockout power back in the heavyweight division. They want guys who come in and fight. I think the UFC is hoping for shorter fights. Because nobody wants… The guy I’m fighting, his last fight, against Omielanczuk, that was no good fight. That was not a good fight, it wasn’t. And the way it ended just sucked. And nobody wants to watch that. Somebody wants somebody who can stop that fight in the second round and say ‘It’s done.’ Except if you’ve got a jiu jitsu clinic, then everybody wants to see it, but elsewise, the don’t want to see round 3 of a heavyweight fight. And that’s it, that’s how it is. And that’s why I think a guy like Stipe, he can be champion right now. He’s athletic, he’s always in super shape, and he’s strong, he goes at it.”

As for Danho? Aside from his fight with Daniel Omielanczuk, Colombo feels he should have the solution to picking the Syrian-born German apart:

“You hit it right on the nail,” Colombo agreed. “He’s a big strong dude. I think he’s real strong, he looks like he’s real strong. I think he used to do power lifting, or world’s strongest man, something like that. But no, he’s not a good boxer, doesn’t look like a good wrestler, and I’ve never seen any of his jiu jitsu. I saw one of his fights where he picks a guy up, another heavyweight, just picked him up and dumps him on his head, punches him two times and the guy taps out. My approach will definitely be: I’m a little bit taller than him, I don’t weigh as much as him, so stay on the outside and punch him in the face. If he comes too close he’s going to eat my knees and my elbows.”

Colombo will take on Jarjis Danho on the prelim portion of UFC Hamburg. The event will be broadcast live, on Fight Pass, this Saturday, September 1st. You can find Christian Colombo on Twitter @GodzillaColombo