Many years ago, ice hockey dreams danced in the head of top UFC lightweight contender Arman Tsarukyan.
“When I was young, I didn’t think about fighting. I was just playing hockey,” Tsarukyan, an ethnic Armenian born in Georgia and raised in Russia, recently told The Post. “I wanted to be an NHL player.”
Hoisting the Stanley Cup won’t be in Tsarukyan’s future, but he may be days away from taking UFC gold back home with him to Russia, provided he can usurp champion Islam Makhachev on Saturday in the UFC 311 pay-per-view main event in Inglewood, Calif.
Tsarukyan created a minor stir earlier this month when a video shared on his YouTube channel had translated his Russian words as saying he was not “100 percent invested” in mixed martial arts, a startling and puzzling revelation for a fighter who meticulously climbed the UFC ranks at 155 pounds since his 2019 promotional debut.
Former middleweight champion Michael Bisping, a UFC Hall of Famer who now frequently performs color commentator duties for the promotion, caught wind of that line and called it out on his “Believe You Me “ podcast.
“If there is even a little bit of truth [to Tsarukyan’s lack of investment in MMA], he loses to Islam Makhachev,” Bisping said, “because … there’s one guy who is committed, there is one guy who pushes himself, and that’s Islam.”
As Tsarukyan explained to The Post, Bisping need not worry, and the 28-year-old chalked up the whole situation as a mistranslation for the video’s English subtitles.
Tsarukyan pointed to “slang” being difficult to translate from one language to the other as a key culprit in what amounts to much ado about nothing.
He explained that, in contrast to Makhachev’s lifelong focus on MMA as a disciple of late coach Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov and friend of the leader’s UFC legend son Khabib, Tsarukyan’s commitment to this sport is a more recent development.
“We had completely different lifestyles, and Islam, he was invested all his life with this,” says Tsarukyan, the former aspiring hockey star. “But I started [to] invest when I was, like, 18 years old, 17 years old when I started [to] train MMA.”
Once the call from the UFC came, all of his focus went into making the most of the opportunity, and to this day he “of course” is now 100 percent invested.
Capturing the championship matters most to Tsarukyan (22-3, 14 finishes) this weekend at Intuit Dome, but there’s also an angle of pursuit of retribution at play as it was Makhachev who dealt Tsarukyan a loss in his UFC debut on their shared home soil in Russia six years ago, when both were up-and-comers.
The defeat by decision in a bout that was awarded Fight of the Night honors was a mere bump in Tsarukyan’s path toward the top of the mountain at lightweight.
He rattled off five straight victories over the next three years, having by now racked up a UFC mark of 9-2 that includes a heavily-contested decision loss to Mateusz Gamrot in 2022.
That loss, the most recent blemish on Tsarukyan’s ledger, went down mere months before Makhachev (26-1, 17 finishes) submitted ex-champ Charles Oliveira to become the new king at 155 pounds.
The result pleased Tsarukyan, who had been rooting from afar for Makhachev to find continued success — in part because he’s a fellow Russian but also for self-serving reasons.
“I wanted [Makhachev] to always win because he beat me, and if he loses, people say, ‘Oh, he’s not that good,’ but he beat me,” Tsarukyan explains regarding the champion, who is 14-0 in the UFC since his lone professional loss in October 2015. “When he beat everybody, I said to myself, ‘You see, he’s good, and I gotta train hard. So, I wanted him to be a champion.”
Rematches in championship fights aren’t altogether rare, but it’s far less common for two prospects to square off and, years later, meet again with a title up for grabs.
Leon Edwards and Kamaru Usman had fought under such circumstances, with Edwards needing to face the winner of the first fight a third time to win their trilogy.
If Tsarukyan gets through Makhachev this weekend, Oliveira — who Tsarukyan defeated last April to earn the championship opportunity — currently stands as the top contender-in-waiting.
There’s a strong chance Makhachev’s next fight would be for a title anyway, be it against Tsarukyan or Makhachev.
Though Tsarukyan doesn’t want to get ahead of himself and prefers to focus on Saturday first, he is one of the few top-15 UFC contenders in his weight class that’s under 30 and has said he aspires to fight three times this year.
“First of all, I want to get the title, win my fight,” he said,” and then I can fight with everybody.”