Even though his flight to Austin, Texas didn’t leave until Tuesday morning, Thiago Alves had his bags packed and sitting by the door all weekend. That’s what happens when you’ve been waiting to step into the Octagon since the middle of September and Sunday evening can’t get here fast enough.
The last five months have been a rollercoaster for Alves, who finally returns to action this weekend opposite UFC newcomer Curtis Millender.
He opted to withdraw from his bout with Mike Perry in Pittsburgh after Hurricane Irma left him and his family sleeping at the gym and grounded all the planes trying to leave the area for well over a week. After spending eight hours at the airport on the Tuesday of fight week, eager to find a way to the Steel City to face the welterweight upstart, Alves walked into his home and discovered his English bulldog, Tank, had passed away in the chaos of the storm.
“It broke my heart,” said the Brazilian veteran. “That wasn’t the deciding factor, but I was trying to leave the state for over a week and I was living in the gym out of a suitcase for a week with my wife and my one-year-old boy and I came home after an exhausting day of trying to leave to go fight and I find my best friend of nine years dead, alone in the house.
“That really took a toll. After finding him like that, it made my decision make a lot more sense.”
The 34-year-old welterweight faced the usual barrage of criticism and social media psych evaluations that accompany an athlete pulling out of a fight, with Perry insinuating that the 12-year UFC veteran who went the distance with Georges St-Pierre in a welterweight title fight at UFC 100 and has faced some of the top fighters in the history of the 170-pound weight class was scared to face him and ducking their encounter.
Nothing could be farther from the truth, not that Alves feels the need to justify his decision to Perry or anyone else.
“If you’ve never really been through a hurricane, you don’t know what’s going on and what actually happens,” said Alves, who returned to both the welterweight division and the win column at UFC 210 in Buffalo last April. “It’s a completely frightening state. You don’t know what’s going to happen and how you’re going to get through it.
“I truly believe that to go out there and compete – to do what we do and go out there and perform – you have to be 100 percent ready. You’ve got to have no doubts in your mind, nothing holding you back; that’s the best way to perform. I have too much respect for my sport and too much respect for my business to go into competition mode like that, leaving my family struggling here, not in the best frame of mind, especially being a new father and husband.
“It was my duty to stay with them; my family will always come first.”
After dealing with the aftermath of Irma, Alves was booked to face Zak Cummings as part of the UFC’s debut event in St. Louis, Missouri on January 14 of this year.
The day before the fight, Cummings slipped in the bathtub and was forced to withdraw from the contest.
“It was like, ‘I don’t know who I upset or what happened,’” laughed Alves, reflecting on the last minute cancellation of his fight with Cummings. “But it is what it is. It was such a difficult time in my life, losing my friend and my family going through that situation that it kind of made me numb for a very long time and then not getting the opportunity to fight again it was like, ‘Man, that sucks, but it is what it is. Time to move on. What are we going to do next?’
“I’m kind of bulletproof like that right now.”
In addition to feeling impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Alves believes he’s just now entering the prime of his athletic career.
Despite being more than a decade deep into his UFC run and having logged his first professional appearance nearly 17 years ago, the South Florida staple just turned 34 in October and feels like now is the time for him to take all the knowledge and experience he’s garnered to this point in his career and turn it into one more run of success, starting this weekend in Austin, Texas against Millender.