“The UFC 222 card in Vegas could be open to you – do you want it?” asked House.
“F**k yes, that’s absolutely what I want,” answered Hernandez, who got off the phone without asking House who he was facing in the biggest fight of his life.
“We hung up and I texted him – P.S. who am I fighting?”
Hernandez laughs, and even when told he was going to be fighting a lightweight contender in Dariush, he wasn’t overwhelmed by the moment. In fact, he embraced it, and while he was a sizeable underdog in replacing the injured Bobby Green in the fight, his tunnel vision was clear.
“I first thought, ‘How crazy is this?’ But it can be done. This is my fight and I am gonna do this. I am gonna win this fight. By the end of the week, I couldn’t stop saying this fight is not gonna make it to the second round. I’m gonna finish him in the first. It was like a locomotive steam engine that week and we kept picking up momentum.”
Along the way, he shut out any possibility of doubt creeping in, but a couple nights before he made the walk, he couldn’t help himself.
“I tried to stay offline completely, especially the week of the fight,” Hernandez said. “But I had this little itch and I decided to type in ‘Alex Hernandez UFC’ two nights before the fight and I read something where I was called a ‘one-dimensional wrestler.’ I just thought, yeah, believe that. Awesome.”
Then he ended the fight with a single punch.
“Surprise.”
The Performance of the Night win, which took just 42 seconds, put Hernandez on the map in a big way, which means there will be critics, some of whom criticized what looked to be a fake glove tap at the start of the bout that turned into a kick to the body. That’s really not what happened, he said.
“If you watched any of my fights, I always have a long reach,” he said. “And the second I teap (kick) him, my hands go right back to where they were at before I threw it. I wasn’t trying to Houdini Dariush’s palm. It was always the plan of rush him, find the range and put a hole through his chest.”
But…
“If you see a man storming across the cage at you, charging at full speed and your first thought is, ‘He’s probably coming in hot for the high five,’ you need to reassess what you’re doing in that cage,” Hernandez continues. “I never had any intentions of faking him out. I wasn’t going for that. I was charging him, I caught my range and threw the kick. As you know, he likes to take charge of the center of the cage, he likes to stalk his opponent to their wall and he likes to bully them and everybody respects the hell out of him way more than they need to. So the game plan was that I was gonna storm across the cage and catch him on his end before he gets any kind of cadence set, teap (kick) through his belly, disrupt his breathing, disrupt his pace, and the rest of the game is gonna be mine. It went exactly how we planned.”
Hernandez has a remarkable cool to him in and out of the Octagon. It’s a confidence – coupled with talent – that is going to make him a dangerous young man in the lightweight division in the coming years. As for now, he’s hoping for a summer return to action, though he’s already back in the gym, and he’s obviously a firm believer in the ‘stay ready so you don’t have to get ready’ philosophy. So what happens if he gets another late-notice call for an upcoming card before the summer comes?
“You shut your mouth,” he laughs. Then he pauses and continues.
“Weight’s right, I don’t know. How dirty would that be?”
