Arman Tsarukyan clears air, is 100 percent invested in UFC 311 title fight

Many years ago, ice hockey dreams danced in the head of top UFC lightweight contender Arman Tsarukyan.“When I was young, I didn’t think about fighting.I was just playing hockey,” Tsarukyan, an ethnic Armenian born in Georgia and raised in Russia, recently told The Post.

“I wanted to be an NHL player.”Hoisting the Stanley Cup won’t be in Tsarukyan’s future, but he may be days away from taking UFC gold back home with him to Russia, provided he can usurp champion Islam Makhachev on Saturday in the UFC 311 pay-per-view main event in Inglewood, Calif.Tsarukyan created a minor stir earlier this month when a video shared on his YouTube channel had translated his Russian words as saying he was not “100 percent invested” in mixed martial arts, a startling and puzzling revelation for a fighter who meticulously climbed the UFC ranks at 155 pounds since his 2019 promotional debut.Former middleweight champion Michael Bisping, a UFC Hall of Famer who now frequently performs color commentator duties for the promotion, caught wind of that line and called it out on his “Believe You Me “ podcast.“If there is even a little bit of truth [to Tsarukyan’s lack of investment in MMA], he loses to Islam Makhachev,” Bisping said, “because … there’s one guy who is committed, there is one guy who pushes himself, and that’s Islam.”As Tsarukyan explained to The Post, Bisping need not worry, and the 28-year-old chalked up the whole situation as a mistranslation for the video’s English subtitles.Tsarukyan pointed to “slang” being difficult to translate from one language to the other as a key culprit in what amounts to much ado about nothing.He explained that, in contrast to Makhachev’s lifelong focus on MMA as a disciple of late coach Abdulmanap Nurmagomedov and friend of the leader’s UFC legend son Khabib, Tsarukyan’s commitment to this sport is a more recent development.“We had completely different lifestyles, and Islam, he was invested all his...