Sergio Pettis is done with Roufusport. The bantamweight contender told Bloody Elbow he has left the gym where he spent most of his life, roughly a year after the death of head coach Duke Roufus, and he’s heading into his next fight with new coaches and new training partners.
That fight is Saturday, November 14, against Joji Goto at PFL Dubai. It takes place in the Coca-Cola Arena, the same building where Roufus worked his corner for the last time.
That night was a good one. Pettis stopped Magomed Magomedov with a knockout that belongs on any highlight reel, and Roufus was right there for it. Two weeks later to the day, word got out that Roufus had died. He had turned 55 that February.
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“He seemed so healthy,” Pettis told Bloody Elbow, adding that the loss still devastates him more than a year on. He described Roufus as a father figure he saw nearly every day from the time he was 13 or 14.
The camp that didn’t work
Pettis didn’t leave right away. He stayed at Roufusport for his return to the PFL cage, a matchup with Mitch McKee in April that he would almost certainly have turned into a title shot with a win. McKee, an unbeaten prospect most fans hadn’t heard of, upset him.
Looking back, Pettis framed that camp as grief with gloves on. “I was more fighting for Duke than myself, I even wore his name on my shorts,” he said.
He told Bloody Elbow he wanted to keep the legacy going, but the daily drive to the gym had turned into something else. “I’d be going there, being sad and just trying to continue things and it didn’t feel right,” he said.
Then came the line that will get repeated around Milwaukee for a while. “I outgrew that place a long time ago and Duke being gone signified that and I needed to make some changes.”
Where he’s training now
For the last couple of months, Pettis has bounced between Valle Flow Striking in Illinois and Pura Vida and Wanderley JiuJitsu in Milwaukee. He said he found coaches and partners who fit where he’s at right now, and he was blunt about the clean break: “I haven’t been to Roufusport at all.”
“I’ve been with Duke since I was 13 years old and not having him around was really weird,” he said.
I’ll take a fighter who answers the question straight over one who hands you a statement from his management every time, and Pettis didn’t dodge anything here, including the part where he says he outgrew the place before his coach was gone. The McKee loss looks different now. He was in there carrying a man’s name on his waistband instead of a game plan built for that night. Goto on Saturday is the first real read on whether the new setup gives him back the version of Sergio who flattened Magomedov in that same cage.
