Franklin wonders if he'll be booed in Brazil? |
"I'm excited to fight in Brazil, and I'm actually interested to see if I do get booed for this fight," Franklin told MMAjunkie.com "It would be the first time in a while."
"My family, nobody is going to come see me," Franklin said. "None of my family can come down there. I'll have my cornermen and my wife, and that's it.
"I'll have a total of four people in the audience that are directly tied to me."
And that's where things get a little tricky. Brazil, the birthplace of MMA, has again become a hotbed for the sport in recent years, with the UFC's past two visits to the country producing wildly successful events with intensely passionate crowds.
When it was Sonnen who was expected to make the trip to Brazil, there were some MMA experts who feared for his well-being. Franklin knows he won't be treated quite as poorly, but he's not sure exactly what to expect. After all, four of his six career losses have come to Brazilian opponents, so how angry at him could the crowd truly be?
"I don't know," Franklin said. "I think I have a decent fanbase in Brazil. After all, I've lost to a couple of their fighters, so they've got to like me a little bit, right?
"I'm not playing the evil part. I don't make comments about Brazilian people or negative comments about my opponent or anything like that. I'm just not the evil-part kind of person. I tell you what, if I was in like the WWE and I was playing a fake evil person, I would do a great job of that because I could play the part, but it's just not who I am."
