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Dan Hooker Became a Real Estate Agent after Barboza fight to Make Sure He Wasn’t Ret*rded
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Dan Hooker has always been known for his toughness inside the cage, but after a brutal fight left him dealing with serious injuries, he made an unusual decision—he became a real estate agent.
Following one of the most punishing fights of his career, Hooker suffered from vertigo, vision issues, and lingering damage.
“It would take me about a minute and a half to stand up. I’d have to sit up, sit on the edge of the bed while the room was spinning, then stand up and just not move yet because my brain was telling me something different,” Hooker explained.
Despite the physical toll, he remains proud of the way he pushed himself. “In what other sport do you get to test what you’re mentally made of to that extreme? There isn’t a single other sport on the planet where you can test that,” he said. “I wanted to push that mental dog in me myself.”
After the fight, Hooker needed surgery but ran into delays after choosing to return to New Zealand instead of staying in the U.S. “I should have got it fixed in America,” he admitted. “I ended up waiting weeks just to get it sorted.”
Photo by Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
Hooker also acknowledges the long-term risks of fighting, including brain damage, something combat sports athletes have always been aware of. “You see it happening in rugby, league, and union—now they’re taking concussions seriously. But in combat sports, we’ve known about it forever. It’s not hard to see what’s happened to legends of the game like Muhammad Ali,” he said.
In the aftermath of the fight, Hooker decided to test himself in another way—by getting a real estate license. “I went and got qualified as a real estate agent,” he said. “I was just making sure that I wasn’t retarded.”
It’s a classic Dan Hooker move—pushing himself to extremes, whether it’s inside the cage or in the real world, just to see if he can.
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