When Keanan Patershuk steps into the cage on Saturday, he will be confronted by a young prospect with a penchant for the microphone in Canada’s Hunter Lee. The two will compete for the vacant Unified MMA middleweight title in a highly anticipated battle. While some might have been bothered by the verbal jousting coming the other way, Patershuk’s unconventional route into MMA had him more than prepared for it.
“I was a junior hockey player from the age of 14 until I was 20,” he explained. “Small talk doesn’t bother me. I started playing junior hockey against men when I was fourteen. So I’m more than used to that and more than used to receiving it.”
It wasn’t a clean transition from hockey to MMA for the Warriorcamp product. In fact, there were many more steps on the journey before he even came close to the path he is currently on.
“I spent most of my 20s with my wife. We were just flipping houses, having a profession and raising a family,” he said. “I think it was maybe the fourth or fifth house I flipped, and my wife asked me if we could start traveling abroad, because that’s what I did as a child.”
His wife loved the idea. So the couple and their family packed everything up. They hit the road and embraced the chaos.
“I finally finished everything on the house, put it up for sale, sold it and left the dogs with her parents,” Patershuk said. “And we spent the better part of three months backpacking through the South Pacific with a four-year-old and a two-year-old girl at the time.”
On the way home from that trip, the path to MMA became clear to him, but it wasn’t his suggestion. In fact, it was something his wife knew all along.
“We visited Hawaii, Fiji and Australia and it was incredible. So much fun, but during our entire conversation on that trip she said, ‘what do you want to do?’?” he recalled, noting that she had plans to work in real estate. “I paused for a moment. She just stops and looks at me. She says, you want to do MMA, right? I didn’t have to say it.”
Although she was right, it wasn’t exactly a big secret. The urge to compete has been with him since his hockey days. Now it was time to act on it.
‘I would work like a 12 or 16 hour shift and I have to come home and go to the gym for two hours,” Patershuk explained.”Not only do I need the physical stimulation, but I also have to compete poorly.”
You can catch his next chance to scratch that competitive itch at Unified MMA 67. His title fight against Hunter Lee will take place as the main event, with the card kicking off this Saturday at 8:00 PM EST.
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