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Donald ‘Cowboy’ Cerrone on transition from UFC to racing: ‘I’ll whip your ass’

nbcnewsla.com March 14, 2024

Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone recently put the finishing touches on a Hall of Fame UFC career. What’s next for Cerrone? Racing people in the desert.

On the latest edition of “Kevin Harvick’s Happy Hour,” Cerrone discussed how he’s relishing racing.

“I don’t cheat. I play by the rules. Just like fighting, I never cheated, ever. I always made weight. I never took any drugs. I always played by the rules, so I never was ever worried about anything. Same thing, off-road. I’m gonna race as hard as I can, legally. People know me out there, so they don’t want to bump me, push me, cause there’s no law. I’ll whip your ass and leave you for dead in the middle of the desert, so it’ll be alright,” Cerrone told host Kevin Harvick.

Has Cerrone ever found himself wanting to take a racer into the Octagon? Almost.

“I was driving another guy’s car, and he would pull out, and he would hit us. It’s called nerfing, when someone doesn’t move out of the way, so you make them move. Well, he [another driver] had a Class 1 buggy, which is a 1,000 horsepower buggy. We were in a Can-Am, so way faster than us. He pulled out and slammed it [his car] into the back of our car; I let him by,” Cerrone said. “Then he pulled over about a mile up the road, did it again. Pulled over a mile up the road, did it again, so when we got to the finish line I unbuckled my seat belt and ran back to his car because we finished before him, and I said ‘hey, man, you got a problem? Like, is there something going on? Like, I don’t understand.’

“He’s like ‘oh, no, no, no, no, no, our steering pump was out, our fuel pump kept shutting off. We had to keep pulling over.’ And so, I was like ‘alright,’ so that was the closest I’ve ever been to whipping someone’s ass out at the desert.”

Cerrone, 40, finished his UFC career with 36 wins, 17 losses and two no-contests. Those 36 wins featured 17 wins by submission and 10 knockouts. Cerrone was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame in 2023.

Donald ‘Cowboy’ Cerrone on his transition from UFC to racing and acting

“Cowboy” actually has a link to the NASCAR Cup Series, as he introduced now-former Cup Series driver Kurt Busch when the latter spoke at the 2023 NASCAR Awards and Champion Celebration in November of last year.

Busch finished his NASCAR career with 34 Cup Series wins and, most notably, was the 2004 NASCAR Cup Series champion.

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