Why Robert Whittaker isn't living in a fantasy land ahead of rematch with Israel Adesanya at UFC 271

If former UFC champion Robert Whittaker had his way, he'd be living in a fantasy land.

As Whittaker prepares for a rematch with New Zealand's Israel Adesanya in Houston, Texas at UFC 271 next weekend, he's spent just as much time enjoying the fantasy and science fiction stories he loves as he has preparing to try and recapture the UFC middleweight title.

Whittaker says he relates to the downtrodden characters of those tales, who so often start out as nobodies before building themselves into heroes.

«I love reading those books and visualising myself as those guys who fight dragons. Fighting Adesanya seems pretty simple compared to fighting a dragon,» Whittaker said.

«When the hero gets knocked down but he gets back up, that sort of crap, I like it. I enjoy a main character who I hate at the beginning of the book because he's a whingeing, complaining little pissant.

»But I sit back and I think about how he's been taken out of his comfort zone and into a foreign environment and he's just coping. I can relate to that, I like a good whinge myself.

«Then you see as the book goes on, he's developing and he's getting stronger and he's not whingeing as much because he's stronger. He becomes confident because he becomes stronger.

»That's why I like fantasy so much, that's why I like sci-fi so much, because you don't see that in the real world, and if you do it's just a paragraph, not the whole story."

Whittaker's own story isn't so far from the fantasy tales. There's a sense of a classic hero's journey to the whole thing.

Change a few details and add a little bit of magic and a few swords and his rise from humble CityRail electrician to becoming Australia's first UFC champion could be the opening act of a fantasy trilogy.

But none of the