As part of Arman Tsarukyan’s PR run, he sat down with Daniel Cormier and talked about a ton of things. Tsarukyan opened the episode by reflecting on his humble beginnings. He detailed his family’s journey from rags to riches, explaining how life now is very different from what it was when he first moved to Russia.
Next, Arman Tsarukyan revealed he stopped freestyle wrestling and started playing hockey because he did not have to cut weight for the sport, and it was more fun. Most of his teammates back in school mostly played hockey, and even Tsarukyan competed at an amateur level.
He recalled a coach lauding his skills with the stick and asking him to polish them, as the coach believed Tsarukyan was capable of going pro in hockey.
“All my teammates from school played hockey all day. I was playing with them as an amateur, and still I was wrestling. I was competing in wrestling when I was nine, but three times a week in winter I’d go to the ice and play with them. One coach said, ‘You play pretty good; you have to train in hockey; you can be a hockey player.’ Then I quit wrestling and started to play hockey all day.”
Arman Tsarukyan added that his dad bought him all the expensive hockey gear and supported him in every way. However, ‘Ahalkalakets’ soon realized that since he did not start playing hockey at a tender age, he was behind in skills compared to those who started when they were 4 or 5 years old.
He told Cormier:
“I started a little bit late. I started at nine. I was supposed to start at five or six because those three years are big in hockey. When I was nine or ten, they had already been playing for four or five years. The competition is on a different level.”
Arman Tsarukyan used wrestling in the locker room to defend himself
Arman Tsarukyan recalled that he ultimately decided to walk away from a hockey career and fully commit to wrestling after realizing that, in the long run, most of his teammates neither made real money nor reached the big leagues.
He told ‘DC’ about his younger days, admitting that he would often use his wrestling skills to scrap with teammates in the locker room:
“I used wrestling mostly in the locker room. We were fighting in the locker room, and I was using my wrestling. On the ice, I wasn’t that good at fighting, so my teammates didn’t try to mess with me.”
The 29-year-old believes fighting is rooted in his upbringing. He also added how wrestling always gave him an edge in street fights:
“Where I grew up, that’s why fighting is easy for me. I like fighting; I don’t know where it comes from, maybe from my blood. Even as a kid, we’d go somewhere with two families, and there’s a kid, and my dad would always say, ‘Can you beat this guy?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah,’ and we’d fight. Ten-year-old kids in the village, that’s how it is. I never lost those kid fights because I knew wrestling. I knew how to shoot single and double legs, and that was enough. Because of that, I won all my street fights.”
Check out Arman Tsarukyan’s comments below (3:20):
