Alice Pereira wished to become the youngest girls to signal with the UFC, becoming a member of the promotion just days after turning 19, but in the end lost a resolution to Montserrat Rendon in her debut. She’s back seven months later to face off against Hailey Cowan at UFC Vegas 115, which goes down April 4 at the Meta APEX, and has combined emotions about her first evening as a UFC fighter.
At the same time she lamented not profitable her first UFC look after so much hype and expectation, “Golden Girl” admits feeling bizarre by how apathetic she was in tasting defeat for the first time in six skilled MMA bouts.
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“To be honest, at that moment when my hand wasn’t raised, I wasn’t sad,” Pereira instructed MMA Fighting. “I didn’t leave with the feeling that I had a terrible fight or that I didn’t do my job right. To this day, I don’t know if that was good or bad because I stayed apathetic about my fight for a long time. I didn’t have a bad feeling about it because, to me, I had done a good job.
“I could have been a bit more aggressive, yes, but it’s very easy to say that when you watch it back. When we put together the game plan and the strategy, we go in there ready to follow it to a T, and I didn’t want to give Rendon any opening to take me down. I defended all the takedowns. Maybe that was even part of it. I might have been so focused on defending her takedowns that I held back some of my usual aggressiveness, which is what I was missing a bit to even things out.”
Pereira went from a hightly touted protest to going through excessive criticism from followers in a span of quarter-hour. While some defend that she was too inexperienced to be in the UFC as a 5-0 teenager, Pereira said “there’s no better place in the world for an athlete to be than the UFC.” She’s surrounded by fighters who have been in the UFC before, including her boyfriend Carlos Felipe, so watching from afar taught her that “we really have to ignore [comments online] because if we take everything we read seriously, we’ll go crazy.”
It’s simpler said than executed, though.
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“I was already getting hate even before I was in the UFC, people talking trash in my comments, so imagine when I got in,” Pereira said. “I was absolutely sure of that. What I do most is filter things out now. Unfortunately, one of the things I like most is reading comments on any video, but I avoid it as much as possible now. And sometimes it’s not even my post. There have been many times when I go into a random post and people are talking about me. Like, guys, I’m not even the subject of this post, why are you talking about me? And then I end up getting mad at myself for having read the comments.
“These days, the mental clean-up I do is really about avoiding this kind of content that won’t add anything to me. And in this camp, after my first fight, I wanted to invest more in my mental work, with therapy and everything. Not because of other people’s opinions, but to help me build that mental shield, which might be the key I was missing.”
Pereira determined to fly to Las Vegas a week earlier than initially deliberate to go to the UFC Performance Institute and make use of the construction at the disposal of fighters free of charge, one that “will only add more and help me keep progressing on this journey inside the UFC.” Before the journey, Pereira completed her camp coaching in Rio de Janeiro with visits to a number of groups to work alongside Ketlen Vieira at Nova Uniao and Melissa Gatto at KO Squad.
“We carefully chose the places that would add to my game in terms of knowledge,” Pereira said. “Sometimes it’s a small position you learn, a different grip that can be effective for your game and change everything. Sometimes you learn a slightly different hand position and that could be the key to victory in a fight. We chose where we wanted to go and it was an amazing week. We met a lot of great people and learned a lot.”
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Cowan, who is 14 years older than the Brazilian, has more expertise in the sport after building a 5-2 document in LFA and making two journeys to the octagon. She has her back against the wall after consecutive defeats to Jamey-Lyn Horth and Nora Cornolle in the UFC, and Pereira is assured that she can win in any space.
“This time the story will be different because of many small adjustments we’ve been making throughout the camp,” Pereira said. “I have several paths to win this fight. I like to prepare beforehand, especially for my post-fight interviews. I’m that kind of fighter who already thinks, ‘My God, what am I going to say?’ I’m still undecided because there are so many ways this fight can go and so many ways I can get the win that I’m calm about how it will unfold.
“I don’t think I’ll be frustrated if I don’t get a knockout or a submission. If it goes to the scorecards, that’s fine too. I’m going in very clear-headed, knowing that whatever happens, I’ll be winning rounds and standing out. I know I have multiple paths, so I’m very calm about it.”
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