“Absolutely,” he said. “After you’re risked it all and put what feels like your entire life on the line, nothing else can seem nearly as marvelous. It is something, like you said, only a percentage of a percentage that could ever understand or grasp. And until you do, you could just never understand what that other life is like.”
There is glory in that, and Hernandez, as a young man who could go back to his job as a loan officer or simply focus on his gym, relishes these opportunities. Paydays are nice too, and he expects to walk away with a pair of them after facing Dober. More importantly, he’s happy to have a fresh start in 2020 after a rough 2019 campaign that saw him lose for the first time in the UFC to Donald Cerrone, then eke out a controversial decision win over Francisco Trinaldo.
“It’s so funny because when things are going so well, it’s hard to picture them going poorly,” he said of his reversal of fortunes after a spectacular rookie year in the UFC. It was rough, but he still enters this week’s bout with a 3-1 Octagon slate and a No. 15 ranking at 155 pounds, so there’s that. And while there is the specter of Coronavirus around everything these days, he chuckles that “This has been a unique set of challenges, but to me, Corona is no more deadly than Cerrone or Trinaldo.”
In other words, Alexander Hernandez weathered the storms of the last 16 months and is ready to get back on the road to a title. He likes the sound of that.
“You started something,” he said. “So just finish it.”
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