By Thomas Gerbasi
30. It’s the age when some athletes start to feel a few more aches and pains than they used to, when the reaction time isn’t what it used to be, and when they start to lose a little bit off the fastball. It’s a scary time.
Strangely though, history has shown that heavyweight fighters – whether boxers or mixed martial artists – don’t start to peak until they hit that milestone, and if his last bout with Gabriel Gonzaga is any indication, that’s good news for heavyweight contender Fabricio Werdum, who takes on highly-touted Brandon Vera on June 7th on London’s UFC 85 card.
“With age comes experience,” Werdum told UFC.com through translator Julio Heller. “In jiu-jitsu I reached the top in my division, and it’s always good to look for new challenges. I see my career in a new stage now; I can see myself as a complete fighter now, and MMA is fantastic because it gives me the opportunity to learn and practice other martial arts.”
Werdum’s credentials on the mat are impeccable – two-time Jiu-Jitsu world champion, 2007 ADCC world champion, European Jiu-Jitsu champion, and the owner of a Black Belt in Jiu-Jitsu and a Brown Belt in judo. Six of his ten MMA wins have also come via submission. But it was Werdum’s standup that provoked questions among hardcore MMA fans, especially after a less than scintillating decision loss to Andrei Arlovski in his UFC debut in April of 2007.
So Werdum took matters into his own hands, joining up with Brazil’s famed Chute Boxe team to sew up any holes in his game.
“You know that I’m a jiu-jitsu specialist and my background comes from that so I decided for Chute Boxe to improve my standup skills,” said Werdum. “The sport today is very professional, and you need to be complete in all martial arts. Chute Boxe gave me confidence to be more aggressive and to develop my Muay Thai, I’m very happy with my evolution; I think that everybody saw it.”
At UFC 80 in January, Werdum showed the new dimensions to his game as he shook off a slow start to display some effective in-fighting and striking en route to a second round TKO win over Gonzaga. It was Werdum’s second victory over his countryman (the first coming way back in 2003), but this one was much more important. 0-2 in the UFC wouldn’t have been a good start, especially when winning a championship is Werdum’s ultimate goal.
“It’s always good to win,” he said. “After a bad beginning with Arlovski, it was time for a victory to give me the confidence and motivation to keep training for my main goal, which is the belt.”
Fellow Brazilian Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira is the current interim UFC heavyweight champion and - like Gonzaga - a familiar foe to Werdum, who was decisioned by ‘Minotauro’ in a PRIDE bout in Japan in July of 2006.
“I respect him a lot,” said Werdum of Nogueira. “He is a complete fighter, and he has already shown to the world all his skills in PRIDE and in UFC. We already fought in PRIDE, and it was a very good fight. I wasn´t having the best moment in my life because I lost one of my coaches a few days before the trip, and I think that now both of us are better than we were in that fight. Let’s see if I will have the honor to fight him again.”
If a rematch is going to happen, it will all depend on the result of next Saturday’s bout against Vera, a talented fighter who sailed through his first eight bouts until running into a bump in the road last October when he broke his hand and was subsequently decisioned by Tim Sylvia.
“If I saw some weakness
in the fight, for sure I’m not talking here,” laughed Werdum. “Someone told me that he had an injury at the beginning of the fight against Tim; if this is true it was a problem because something like that at the beginning of a fight can take your confidence down, but I still think that he made a good fight.”
What makes the Werdum-Vera bout even more intriguing is that while ‘The Truth’ is known for his standup attack (which includes a 69 second blitz of Frank Mir at UFC 65 in November of 2006), he has gone on record in the past claiming that he is even more comfortable when fighting on the mat, Werdum’s forte. So where does the Porto Alegre native see the bout heading?
“It doesn’t matter,” said Werdum. “I’m prepared to fight on the ground and on my feet. Like I said, the sport is very professional and UFC is the number one event today with the best fighters so you must be prepared for everything.”
And ‘everything’ is what Werdum is going through as he prepares for battle with the Chute Boxe team.
“The MMA and Muay Thai training are very hard, they’re like a real fight, with no mercy if you are distracted,” he chuckles. “You can see how important it is to have partners that get the best from you all the time.”
As he approaches his sixth year in the fight game, Fabricio Werdum knows that this is the time for him to strike – literally and figuratively – if he is to fulfill his potential in the sport’s premier organization. He’s just fine with that timetable.
“I know exactly how important this fight is in my career,” he said. “It is time to be very well prepared for a great show, and a victory will be the result of everything that we have worked for over for the last few months. My future is on the line, so let´s do it.”
Tags: Fabricio Werdum, UFC 85
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