Jarred Brooks talks ONE Fight Night 36 matchup, wild stories from fighting in Chechnya

Fighting is a brutal sport; you can be on top of the world one minute yet be counted out in the very next.

Jarred Brooks has been a champion twice in the last three years in ONE Championship, but now finds himself on a two-fight skid after an unfortunate twist led to a loss in his trilogy bout with current two-time champion Joshua Pacio.

However, ‘The Monkey God’ feels more confident than ever ahead of his title eliminator against Russia’s Mansur Malachiev at ONE Fight Night 36 on October 3rd.

“I had a goldfish mentality… You know, I was put into a position this past fight to where I had to like really dig down and like actually understand like what happened, you know, between the Reese fight and the Josh fight.”

“Now that the pressure is off, the wind is a little bit cooler. Now I can really just chill, relax and train and enjoy the sport the way that I did before I won the title. I was kind of in a bad place when I won the title against Pacio in the first place. Like I was not mentally there… I was going literally off of just steam that I had in the past, but I lost the steam, I literally felt it right when I won the belt. Then after that, after this past Pacio fight, it was like so liberating to be honest, because I was so worried about getting beat.”

“It wasn’t that bad, right? It really wasn’t as crazy as I thought it was gonna be. It wasn’t the nightmare that you think it is in your head before that happens. Does it suck? Yeah, it sucked, bro. I had to go home to my family, a loser. I had to go home to my family, somebody that, to me, failed them, right? So yeah, that was lingering in my head. It was a salty feeling that I wanted to use in training to get… to get better and use that as my motivation to get to the top again because I’ve always been there.”

“There’s no question of who I am as a fighter and as a man, but mentally that was the problem. And I think that I filled those creases up, bro. I’m super happy in my life right now and the momentum that I’ve been given not by just my family members, my other training mates, my new training mates, the U of M wrestling team. Bro, I had a lot of support in just the past five months and it’s all gonna show, Hopefully, God willing, bro, God ****ing willing, I go out and I beat Mansur Malachiev in fantastic fashion because that’s the way that I want it to do and that’s the way I’ve been working.”

Brooks has been around the block a time or two, and knows what to expect from a fighter like Malachiev.

Back in 2016, before he ever fought in the UFC, Jarred fought in Mansur’s part of the world, on a Grand Prix card by the Chechnyan Gym known as Akhmat Fight Club. 

Having heard elsewhere of rumors of crazy stories from his time there during fight week, I had to ask Jarred about his experience in Chechnya as a guest of dictator Ramazan Kadyrov.

At first he simply said, “Wow, I feel like I’m being Nardwuar’d right now.”

Once Jarred got to talking though, the stories came naturally.

“I didn’t have a bad interaction with anybody besides, you know, getting stopped from the airport to the hotel like 10 times by armed guards and them pulling you out of the vehicle… But yeah, we were at the weigh-ins and I gave a good performance dancing in front of them, because they do that crazy twitchy dancing over there. And I went out in the middle of the circle and I did a windmill and they all went crazy. And then Kadyrov came up to me and he was like hugging me and stuff.”

“And I didn’t even know who Kadyrov was, bro. I didn’t know he was the president of Chechnya. None of that, bro. And he liked me so much. I took Magomed Bibulatov’s belt off of his shoulder, he was the champ of of that of that promotion, then he got in my face. Dude, you think that I’m mind games now? Holy crap. I was [doing crazy] mind games in 2015, like right when my pro career started. He came up in my face and I was like, ‘I’m not impressed with your sambo.’ And I knew that that was the only thing that he would understand in English and I was supposed to fight him after Chris.”

“So my fight was the first fight, but Kadyrov couldn’t make it in time and he really wanted to watch me fight. So he bumped my fight to the eighth fight.”

“And then after he wanted to bring me to his palace or wherever he was at and my coach James, this is like his first time ever coaching me, he was like, ‘Dude, I don’t know if this is a good idea, bro.’ But I did jump on the president after the fight and my coach is like, ‘Dude, you’re going to get us killed. You’re going to get us killed.’ The guns were up.”

Jarred felt he should probably not talk too much about an active case when I asked him about the class-action lawsuit against the UFC he could be a beneficiary of, and before I knew it we were running out of time after several great, long answers.

“[I’ll] be honest: any which way, bro. I’m gonna go out and I’m gonna try to literally put my hands on this guy. This guy literally put his name on a contract saying that he can fucking kill me. So I’m gonna go out and I’m gonna kill this guy. Literally. I’m going to put him so far down, he’s talked so much s*** already, it’s not even funny. He’s a great fighter, like I said, he has a great physical DNA structure, but at the end of the day bro, this is the fight game.

“You signed to try to kill me so I got assigned to try to kill you, that’s the name of the game.”

Brooks will go into battle with those bad intentions in mind against Moscow’s Mansur Malachiev on October 3rd, 2025 on a stacked Fight Night card, live from Lumpinee Stadium in Thailand, with the winner looking for a shot at the undisputed champ, Joshua Pacio.

ONE Championship’s #1 strawweight Jarred Brooks takes on #2 Mansur Malachiev at ONE Fight Night 36 on October 3rd, live on Amazon Prime Video from Lumpinee Stadium in Bangkok, Thailand.