Alice Pereira wanted to become the youngest women to sign with the UFC, joining the promotion just days after turning 19, but ultimately lost a decision to Montserrat Rendon in her debut. She’s back seven months later to face off against Hailey Cowan at UFC Vegas 115, which goes down April 4 at the Meta APEX, and has mixed feelings about her first night as a UFC fighter.
At the same time she lamented not winning her first UFC appearance after so much hype and expectation, “Golden Girl” admits feeling weird by how apathetic she was in tasting defeat for the first time in six professional MMA bouts.
“To be honest, at that moment when my hand wasn’t raised, I wasn’t sad,” Pereira told MMA Fighting. “I didn’t leave with the feeling that I had a terrible fight or that I didn’t do my job right. To this day, I don’t know if that was good or bad because I stayed apathetic about my fight for a long time. I didn’t have a bad feeling about it because, to me, I had done a good job.
“I could have been a bit more aggressive, yes, but it’s very easy to say that when you watch it back. When we put together the game plan and the strategy, we go in there ready to follow it to a T, and I didn’t want to give Rendon any opening to take me down. I defended all the takedowns. Maybe that was even part of it. I might have been so focused on defending her takedowns that I held back some of my usual aggressiveness, which is what I was missing a bit to even things out.”
Pereira went from a hightly touted protest to facing extreme criticism from fans in a span of 15 minutes. While some defend that she was too green to be in the UFC as a 5-0 teenager, Pereira said “there’s no better place in the world for an athlete to be than the UFC.” She’s surrounded by fighters who have been in the UFC before, including her boyfriend Carlos Felipe, so watching from afar taught her that “we really have to ignore [comments online] because if we take everything we read seriously, we’ll go crazy.”
It’s easier said than done, though.
“I was already getting hate even before I was in the UFC, people talking trash in my comments, so imagine when I got in,” Pereira said. “I was absolutely sure of that. What I do most is filter things out now. Unfortunately, one of the things I like most is reading comments on any video, but I avoid it as much as possible now. And sometimes it’s not even my post. There have been many times when I go into a random post and people are talking about me. Like, guys, I’m not even the subject of this post, why are you talking about me? And then I end up getting mad at myself for having read the comments.
“These days, the mental clean-up I do is really about avoiding this kind of content that won’t add anything to me. And in this camp, after my first fight, I wanted to invest more in my mental work, with therapy and everything. Not because of other people’s opinions, but to help me build that mental shield, which might be the key I was missing.”
Pereira decided to fly to Las Vegas a week earlier than originally planned to visit the UFC Performance Institute and make use of the structure at the disposal of fighters free of charge, one that “will only add more and help me keep progressing on this journey inside the UFC.” Before the trip, Pereira finished her camp training in Rio de Janeiro with visits to multiple teams to work alongside Ketlen Vieira at Nova Uniao and Melissa Gatto at KO Squad.
“We carefully chose the places that would add to my game in terms of knowledge,” Pereira said. “Sometimes it’s a small position you learn, a different grip that can be effective for your game and change everything. Sometimes you learn a slightly different hand position and that could be the key to victory in a fight. We chose where we wanted to go and it was an amazing week. We met a lot of great people and learned a lot.”
Cowan, who is 14 years older than the Brazilian, has more experience in the sport after building a 5-2 record in LFA and making two trips to the octagon. She has her back against the wall after consecutive defeats to Jamey-Lyn Horth and Nora Cornolle in the UFC, and Pereira is confident that she can win in any area.
“This time the story will be different because of many small adjustments we’ve been making throughout the camp,” Pereira said. “I have several paths to win this fight. I like to prepare beforehand, especially for my post-fight interviews. I’m that kind of fighter who already thinks, ‘My God, what am I going to say?’ I’m still undecided because there are so many ways this fight can go and so many ways I can get the win that I’m calm about how it will unfold.
“I don’t think I’ll be frustrated if I don’t get a knockout or a submission. If it goes to the scorecards, that’s fine too. I’m going in very clear-headed, knowing that whatever happens, I’ll be winning rounds and standing out. I know I have multiple paths, so I’m very calm about it.”
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