Alan Belcher knew even more than the average fan who has watched Rousimar Palhares compete in the UFC cage lately just how nasty the Brazilian can be when his fights go to the ground.
But he wasn’t about to let that dictate his approach when the two met in a critical middleweight bout on Saturday’s UFC on FOX show.
While Belcher had won five of his past six fights by a variety of manners, Palhares had been submitting his opponents early and often, usually of the leg-twisting variety.
In addition, Palhares won a silver medal at the 2011 Abu Dhabi Combat Club Submission Wrestling World Championship, winning his first three fights by heel hook or knee bar to advance to the final, where he lost on points to Andre Galvao.
Belcher said prior to their tilt he had watched some those matches, and it admittedly made him nervous. So he went out and found the best grapplers he could to prepare him for what might have been to come, and he credits their help for getting him to a place where he could attack Palhares with abandon.
“I brought in some amazing people like my friend Daniel Moraes, who’s been with me the past couple months, Davi Ramos and Dean Lister," Belcher said after his first-round TKO victory. "They tapped me out so many times in the first week, but after that they couldn’t get me anymore.
"So I’d just been there so much, I was just really prepared (against Palhares)."
Moraes and Ramos, from Brazil, have competed at high-level grappling competitions (and Moraes has fought three times in MMA, going 1-2 with a 2007 armbar submission of current UFC fighter Matt Brown). Meanwhile, the American Lister fought six times in the UFC (4-2) and three times in Pride, and has also competed at ADCC events and won a 2003 title.
Of note, Lister is actually coming off a victory in a smaller promotion in March, where he won by — you guessed it — heel hook.
Belcher, a Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt himself, had faced plenty of strong BJJ practitioners before — including Jason MacDonald, Wilson Gouveia, Denis Kang and Ed Herman — in the past few years and emerged victorious.
Still, none had the same pedigree or as much recent success as Palhares. So many thought Belcher would want no part of a ground battle.
Instead, Belcher went willingly into Palhares’s guard, and from there it was all over. For Palhares, that is.
A raining stream of punches and elbows left the referee no choice but to end the bout with less than a minute left in the first round.
That gave the 28-year-old, who trains regularly under Duke Roufus in Milwaukee, a fourth straight victory, three of which have been from strikes (the other, a rear naked choke of Patrick Cote after a striking assault, culminating with a slam.)
His current run has demonstrated just how dynamic and well-rounded a fighter he has become since going a fairly pedestrian 3-3 in his first half dozen appearances in the Octagon. Not to mention completely unafraid to take the fight anywhere.
But it was the degree of preparation he did for this fight, aided by the addition of the trio of grappling experts, that got him more than ready — and not just physically, but mentally too — for the biggest win of his career.
“I’d been preparing for this fight for a couple months, I psyched myself out watching his fights in Abu Dhabi, I saw him just tearing people’s legs off at the highest level over and over. This guy’s a beast,” Belcher said. "I just psyched myself up so much that it made the fight real easy.”
He’s hoping his next fight is for the middleweight title, and UFC president Dana White didn’t dismiss that possibility out of hand at the post-fight press conference.
Whether he gets current champion Anderson Silva, his UFC 148 challenger Chael Sonnen, or someone else before that, you can bet Belcher will go to whatever lengths are necessary to prepare. And he won’t be deterred by the dangers his opponent may pose.
