A biography for Dan Hookerhasn’t been written yet.
“Saying I don't look like a fighter - what does a fighter look like? I don't know.”
“If I have drama with a guy or I actually dislike someone, I have no problem sorting it out. I have no problem getting into conflict about it.”
“It's a game of adjustments, I would say, fighting. You learn lessons from your previous fight and you make adjustments.”
“When a fight gets hard and you're getting pushed and broken down, you think in your head, 'I've paid too much of a price. I've sacrificed too much of my life, I've sacrificed the last three months for this moment and there's no way I'm going to quit now.'”
“I understand the rankings, they're fun to talk about, it's something to argue with your mates about.”
“I want to be a contender, I want to be competing against guys at the top, I want to fight the prospects, I want to fight the guys that people don't want to fight, that's what motivates me to do this sport, not big money and things like that.”
“I decided a very long time ago that I'm all in for this sport, regardless of success or failure.”
“It's not like you can just click your fingers and make an adjustment like that, you have to change your whole approach to the sport.”
“When you start with 'I'm going to go on a diet,' you get to like a couple of days in or a week in, two weeks in, and you get that voice in the back of your head going 'why are you doing this?' If you don't have a strong reason and a strong motivation for doing it, you quit obviously.”
“I don't want to be known as a good loser.”
“I don't go out there to win rounds. I'm going out there and I'm setting up a finish.”
“New Zealand's got so much more talent to showcase.”
“It is quite overwhelming when you are a kickboxing student and you get taken to, say, a jiu jitsu class and are being taught something completely different.”
“Fighting is a mixture of thinking and your reactions, a balance.”
“Fighting for $50,000 bonuses when I had no money and it could really change my life... you're gonna hunt it.”
“The mistake a lot of people make in that they think they're made of papier-mache. They take a loss and they're like, 'Oh, that's it. I'm done. I can't get better.' Man, that gets me.”
“I'm a guy that's not ever been scared to put myself in terrible positions or bad positions in a training environment.”
“A career's not one or two years. It's your career - once you finish you want to be set up for life, you don't want to go back and have to start again somewhere else.”
“I know for a fact, win or lose, I'm going on another trip to the hospital if I fight Tony Ferguson.”
“When I pull on those UFC gloves, that's my black jersey, that is All Black level.”