Robbie Lawler

(This story appears in today’s edition of USA TODAY.)

Five years into his professional MMA career, Robbie Lawler decided that he’d had enough of sparring, the one activity that most fighters and trainers will tell you is an absolute essential for pre-fight preparation.

If you’re looking for a way to sum up Lawler’s meandering path to a second UFC welterweight title shot at Saturday’s UFC 181 in Las Vegas (10 p.m., pay-per-view), this is as good a place to begin as any.

This was back in 2006, shortly before his first and only fight for Japan’s now-defunct Pride Fighting Championships organization. In practice one day as he was gearing up for that fight, Lawler got hit with a good punch.

“It wasn’t anything too hard,” Lawler, 32, tells USA TODAY Sports and MMAjunkie. “But when we went straight from sparring to grappling and I laid down on my back, the room started spinning.”

It didn’t stop spinning once practice was over, either. In fact, it didn’t stop spinning for weeks, not even after he knocked out Joey Villasenor in 22 seconds at PRIDE 32. Even for a professional tough guy like Lawler, this was worrisome.

So he stopped sparring altogether. Instead he watched from the edge of the mat while his teammates sparred, and he shadowboxed alone. He did this for six years. He was the MMA equivalent of an NFL linebacker showing up to practice without his pads and helmet, politely declining to participate in any tackling drills. This did not go unremarked upon by teammates.

“Guys would make fun of me,” Lawler says. “(Former UFC heavyweight champion) Tim Sylvia would be like, ‘Get in here and spar.’ I’d just tell him, ‘Nah, I’m good.’ I thought, you know, I know how to fight.”

Looking back, Lawler can admit that he might have taken this strategy too far, and for too long. Taking fewer hits to the head may have very well added years to his career, he suspects, but the lack of live contact also cost him in some of his later fights.

Johny Hendricks and Robbie Lawler

Then again, to hear Lawler (24-10 MMA, 9-4 UFC) tell it, maybe he had to make those mistakes then in order to get to where he is today. If not for some missteps over the course of a career that’s spanned more than 13 years, maybe he wouldn’t be here, on the verge of a rematch with UFC 170-pound champion Johny Hendricks (16-2 MMA, 11-2 UFC), against whom he lost a unanimous decision in a Fight of the Year candidate in March.

Without those difficult years, Lawler also may never have found his way to his new training home at the American Top Team gym in Coconut Creek, Fla., where his late-career resurgence began after years of mediocrity marked by brief flashes of brilliance.

According to the gym’s head coach and co-founder, Ricardo Liborio, Lawler “really found himself” at ATT, after arriving there as a sort of MMA orphan.

Prior to joining ATT and moving to South Florida fulltime, Lawler had trained at the famed Miletich Fighting Systems camp in Bettendorf, Iowa, and then in Illinois with longtime friend and former UFC welterweight champion Matt Hughes, who has since retired.

“He came up with all those guys,” Liborio says, “and I think when they all reached the end and kind of moved on, he felt like, ‘What about me? What am I supposed to do now?'”

After years of being in charge of his own training, ATT gave him structure and guidance, Lawler says. Inside those walls, “I don’t have to think,” he says. “I show up, and there’s a coach telling me what I’m doing that day.”

That includes a fair amount of sparring, which Lawler says has been a good thing for him, but he doesn’t regret the years he went without it, just like he doesn’t regret the years he flailed around in Strikeforce as an undersized middleweight, or the years before that when his only goal was fighting as often as possible in order to get paid as often as possible.

“I think I had to go through those things,” Lawler says. “I had to live and learn, and that’s probably the best way to do it.”

For a hard-headed slugger like Lawler, it might even be the only way.

For more on UFC 181, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.