“Some people are kind of blaming me for making the new Zombie boring, but I look at longevity,” Cha said. “Our coaching staff talked about it. With the style that he had back then, there’s no way that he’d still be fighting now. They’re literally wars. We’re looking for Performance of the Night, not Fight of the Night for Zombie. We kind of mixed in some more of a distance game. Being more patient. Slowing the fight down, so to speak, with wrestling and so forth.”
That said, it hasn’t been a smooth or conventional path back to a title shot. Limited to six fights since then, including no fights from mid-2013 to early-2017 while he served his mandatory military service, momentum was hard to come by. Losses to Yair Rodriguez and Brian Ortega kept him from becoming the clear No. 1 contender, but the longtime fan favorite finally saw the chips fall his way when Max Holloway fell out of a trilogy fight with Volkanovski.
At 5 a.m. in South Korea, Jung woke to several phone calls from Cha in Arizona. While he was asleep, a title shot had been offered, and they needed to provide an answer. Naturally, he accepted, and it was time to get to work. Despite the replacement nature of the fight, Jung and his team have been able to prepare for the fight since January, and he doesn’t feel like he is just stepping in for Holloway. He believes he has earned this opportunity in full.
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“There are some more unreasonable title fights if comparing with mine,” he said. “Compared with those title fights, I am feeling fine. If we count who should be the title challenger in the Top 5, I think I am just right after Holloway.”
