Beyond the Fight: Guillard vs. Miller
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Melvin Guillard was taught to value hard work. | Photo:
Sherdog.com
Melvin Guillard and Jim Miller collide on Friday in Nashville, Tenn., in the UFC on FX 1 headliner. It will be a battle of two top-shelf lightweight contenders, but it will also be a matchup of two 28-year-olds who have starkly different, yet, in some ways, similar outlooks on life, family and mixed martial arts.
Guillard and Miller were guests this month on the “Sunday Sitdown” segment on the Sherdog Radio Network’s “Rewind” program. In the long-form talks, the natives of New Orleans and New Jersey discussed who they are and where they come from.
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‘They just taught us to appreciate everything.’
“All the neighbors, everybody knew everybody. It was one of those types of neighborhoods where the neighbors see you doing something wrong and they had permission to spank you. And then you get home, and you get another spanking. But, you know, with every good neighborhood, there came the drugs, the prostitution and stuff like that on the corner … My parents, they worked hard, but when you have five brothers and two sisters growing up -- three were adopted -- it’s kind of hard. Really, my parents, they just taught us to appreciate everything.
“My dad was a self-contractor, my family [has] a family contracting business. I used to work for my dad for pennies. I felt like a little slave, man, building five-star homes from the ground up, him and my uncles. It was passed down from my grandfather, for generations.
“My first vehicle, at the age of 17 or 18, was my dad’s old Comanche Jeep truck. It had no engine in it. I actually paid my dad 400 bucks for the truck. He never gave me anything, but he taught me a life lesson: that nothing’s given to you in life. You have to go and get, you have to work hard and you have to sometimes go out and take what you want, but not in a bad way; you’ve got to go and work for it to take it. That’s the way I live my life now, and that’s the way I fight.”
‘My parents worked their asses off to support us.’
“I had a pretty easy childhood. I’m the third of four children, two older brothers and a younger sister. Grew up middle class; my parents worked their asses off to support us. My mother is a nurse and my father worked construction, framing houses and stuff like that. Both of them worked so hard and still made time to come to wrestling matches and football games and baseball games and go to my sister’s cheerleading and stuff like that. They deserve so much credit that they don’t get for raising me and my siblings. They got two professional fighters, a vet and a brilliant, brilliant young girl who wanted to be a social worker; that’s what she deiced to do.
“My parents still, to this day ... they come to basically every UFC. My dad has missed two, one because he had surgery three days before my fight and he wasn’t allowed to fly. And he missed [my brother] Dan’s fight in Brazil. My mom, my mom missed my fight in England, and she might not have missed any other ones than that.”
Continue Reading » Next Dad’s Influence
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