If there’s ever been a formula to superstardom in the UFC, it’s to do what Alex Pereira did at UFC 303 on Saturday night. Show up as a kind of savior to one of the biggest pay-per-view events of the year. Stare down Jiri Procházka, a modern-day samurai cut straight from Akira Kurosawa’s cloth of badassery, for nearly five chilling minutes without blinking.
And then knock him out.
Not once, but twice. The first was right as the opening round was ending, just to get people up out of their seats. And then again with a head kick just 13 seconds into the second round, a kind of coup de grâce to make everyone forget that Conor McGregor, the greatest draw the UFC has ever known, was nowhere to be seen.
Pereira didn’t just save UFC 303 by filling in for McGregor—who was forced to withdraw from his scheduled fight with Michael Chandler due to a broken toe—but he also made sure to monopolize the imagination in the same way McGregor did when he was skyrocketing to the top. Pereira took all the doubts he heard for signing up for such a high-stakes fight on two weeks’ notice like a shot of Jack Daniels and then stacked his empty on the pyramid of shot glasses just like it.
That’s rock and roll. That’s the kind of stuff that makes legends in the UFC. Who’s next? Magomed Ankalaev? Jamahal Hill again? A trilogy fight with Israel Adesanya? A heavyweight cameo against Tom Aspinall? Jon freaking Jones? They’re all box-office hits waiting to happen as we roll through the summer.
In the end, “Poatan” retained his light heavyweight title with the ease of a guy just out having a bit of Saturday night fun—which is some next-level wizard sh*t when you consider the pressure being placed on him to deliver. On a card that underwent such an extreme facelift that it became nearly unrecognizable from its original form, he made sure that anyone who didn’t ask for a refund left with a sense of having witnessed something great—something like a fight-game meteor shooting across the sky. It was an impossible task, considering that before Pereira came aboard, UFC 303 had already become the biggest gate in UFC history.
McGregor sold it. Pereira delivered.
Put that into context for a minute. People from all over the world shelled out massive amounts of money to see McGregor’s first fight in three years, and instead happily settled for a nearly 37-year-old dude who just two weeks ago was in Australia doing seminars, nursing a broken toe of his own. A Brazilian who doesn’t speak but a few words of English, who happily embraces his stone-faced likeness to the statues on Easter Island, and who doesn’t have it in him to say “no” to ridiculous fight offers. That was the guy who made Conor McGregor an afterthought. That’s the guy the UFC should be celebrating as the next coming.
It’s a testament to Pereira’s rising star power that even with the switch in main events, UFC 303—after the dust settled—still finished as the fourth all-time highest gate in the promotion’s 31 years of existence. Nobody outside of maybe Jon Jones would’ve been able to pull off filling that kind of crater-sized hole left by McGregor.
And the UFC should be thanking Pereira, too, for continually donning the cape, just like he did when a star was needed to headline UFC 300 in April. In that one, he melted former champion Jamahal Hill to cap off the UFC’s most anticipated card of the year.
For this one? Let’s just say that UFC 303 at times felt like a sinkhole before Pereira made the walk. It wasn’t that good. In fact, it was a bizarre makeshift card right up until the eleventh hour, in which the first three fights on the PPV main card ended in choruses of boos.
Ian Machado Garry—McGregor’s fellow Irishman hoping to get some of the McGregor rub by appearing on the same card as his mentor—essentially nullified the vaunted striking game of Michael “Venom” Page via various forms of suffocation. That didn’t sit well with fans hoping for fireworks. Macy Chiasson then opened a gnarly gash above Mayra Bueno Silva’s eyebrow, bringing the next bout to an anticlimactic end in the second round. That, too, was a buzzkill.
And in a musical chairs swing bout, Anthony Smith (who was filling in for the injured Jamahal Hill) had nothing for Roman Dolidze (a middleweight fighting up as a light heavyweight, filling in for the injured Carlos Ulberg—who was filling in for the suspended Khalil Rountree Jr.) in a cobbled-together affair. If that weren’t enough, Dan Ige, a featherweight who was tapped to fight Diego Lopes on just a few hours’ notice when Brian Ortega showed up to the T-Mobile Arena in Las Vegas with a fever and was forced to pull out. Ige volunteered, weighed in backstage, took off his shoes, and presto—he was in the co-main event.
That’s the kind of card it was. To cap off International Fight Week, the UFC returned to its Wild West roots.
Yet UFC 303 will be remembered as the night Pereira landed a head kick that sent Procházka down to the canvas in a heap of limpened limbs. The image of Pereira reaching down to reset his broken toe after the knockout will live on as a symbolic one. He replaced an irreplaceable fighter—who couldn’t go because of a broken toe—while dealing with his own mangled toe. And he did the job anyway.
Afterward, UFC president Dana White insisted at the post-fight press conference that Jon Jones was still the best pound-for-pound fighter on the planet. Maybe that’s true, even if you consider that Pereira has defeated Adesanya, former champion Sean Strickland, Jan Blachowicz, and a monster like Procházka—not once, but twice—all in just two years. Or that Pereira has gone 8-1, winning titles in two different weight classes, since debuting in November 2021, while Jones has fought just twice since February 2020.
What makes a hero in today’s UFC is getting in there and doing the damn thing. Without hesitation. Risking it all to save cards, and to keep fans talking. The Jones-Pereira debate will rage on, but if the two were to face each other, the world would stop what it was doing to watch. Why? Because Pereira is the new scariest guy going, and he keeps showing up. When Jones was scheduled to fight Stipe Miocic at UFC 295 at Madison Square Garden last November but had to pull out because of a torn pec muscle, who was it that stepped in?
None other than Alex Pereira. The man who, in the absence of the UFC’s biggest stars, has emerged as the greatest ticket going.
Chuck Mindenhall writes about combat sports without bias, and sometimes about his Denver teams with extreme bias. He cohosts The Ringer MMA Show on Spotify.
