Despite leaving UFC 84 with a hefty check for 75 thousand dollars, beyond the purse stipulated in his contract, last Saturday did not end the way Brazilian Wilson Gouveia would have liked. Participant in the fight of the night, along with Croatian Goran Reljic, the ATT athlete has his string of four consecutive wins interrupted by a technical knockout in the second round.
The defeat itself, perhaps, was not the worst part for Wilson, but the way it took place was. GRACIEMAG.com had a chat with the fighter, who had just left the doctor’s with his son, to clear up the controversy surrounding the best fight of the night.
“As with any defeat, I learned something. There was a bit of a misunderstanding behind the scenes of the fight.This guy has a manager named Goran, who trained at the ATT as a student and not as a professional. This guy would spy on me and that was why he was kicked out of the gym. After that, he kept provoking my opponent into mad dogging me all the time and things like that, unpleasant stuff. Not to mention he tried to headbutt me during the weigh-ins. So with that, I ended up taking things personally, which was wrong," said the fighter, who despite the discouraging result, comes out well in the eyes of the UFC.
“Instead of professional fighting, I went in there to street fight,” he confesses. “I had gone in calm, progressed in the positions, gone to win, since I’m a professional and I live off of this. My business is Jiu-Jitsu, I could have tried to pass the guard, but I wanted to ground and pound him and I ended up running out of steam a bit. He took advantage of a good opportunity. He’s tough, I fought him without any information on him. The guy’s really tall, has a long reach and hits hard. The guy will have a lot said about him. But his attitude was really unprofessional and he has to get put in his place. Even though he talks a lot of crap, he's an excellent fighter," said the Brazilian.
