UFC light heavyweight champion Alex Pereira wasn’t going to miss out on a big opportunity.
Pereira (10-2 MMA, 7-1 UFC) will run things back with Jiri Prochazka (30-4-1 MMA, 4-1 UFC) in Saturday’s UFC 303 (pay-per-view, ESPN, ESPN+) main event at T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas.
Pereira got the call less than two weeks ago after the original headliner between Conor McGregor and Michael Chandler fell apart. He will make a two-month turnaround after knocking out Jamahal Hill at UFC 300 in April – another main event that came together for him on short notice.
“I like taking these opportunities,” Pereria told The MacLife through an interpreter. “I’m going to be 37. I don’t know how much longer I’m going to be fighting. It’s a good opportunity for me to keep myself active, to keep myself training. I’m always training, so these opportunities, you’ve just got to take them whenever they come.”
Pereira’s decision to accept the fight on short notice was also facilitated by his opponent, Prochazka, whom he was already expecting to fight.
“It’s hard to say if I would accept the fight against someone else, but in this case it is Jiri,” Pereira said. “It’s not necessarily the fact that I’ve fought him before and beat him before, but the fact that we knew we were supposed to be fighting soon.
“We didn’t expect it to be this soon, but we were already expecting to fight each other, so I feel like we’re almost around the same timing. If we were to fight in August, this is when we would start picking up training.”
Pereira knocked out Prochazka to claim the vacant light heavyweight title this past November at UFC 295. He doesn’t expect a different version of Prochazka when they run things back.
“I don’t think he would have changed that much. It hasn’t been that long,” Pereira said of Prochazka. “I was just watching his last fight yesterday, and obviously you can’t compare because it’s a different fight, but I don’t think he was able to change that much since our last fight. If there’s one thing I could maybe change, it’s my takedown defense.”
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for UFC 303.
