Crute in UFC rise after body ‘didn’t work right’
WHEN Jimmy Crute had no money for petrol as a teenager, he started selling his computer games online. Then, when he ran out of those?
“Whatever I could find around the house,” he says. “Even if something could get me $10 in petrol, I sold it.” At the time, Crute was 19. A Bendigo high school dropout who, apart from working a plumbing apprenticeship, or driving four hours every day to train in Melbourne, was also rising to jog in the dark, building a body that “didn’t work right” and still hearing the words of a teacher who sent him packing in Year 9.
“And I don’t want to throw them under the bus,” Crute says. “But that teacher said I’d never amount to anything.”
A conversation which started a year earlier, when the same teacher asked what Crute wanted to do post school.
“I said I was going to fight in the UFC,” he continues. “But the teacher told me ‘no, pick a real job’.” Yet young Jimmy persisted, not only explaining how cage fighting was a real job, but that he intended devoting every hour to making it all the way to the UFC.
“So the school ended up phoning my parents,” he says. “Told mum and dad they were concerned, said I wasn’t co-operating. They thought I was taking the piss. But I was dead serious.” He still is.
Which is why this Sunday in Las Vegas, Crute faces rising US contender Jamahal Hill in a showdown to announce the UFC light heavyweight division’s next top 10 contender.
Better, and with the Australian fight game in its best shape in years – thanks to the likes of George Kambosos, Alexander Volkanovski, Robert Whittaker and Tim Tszyu – Crute also now looms as the nation’s next breakout star.
Which is some rise for the man who as a young boy, couldn’t even walk properly
“Athletically, I had some hillbilly strength,” he says.
“But a fighting spirit.”