TOKYO – Ovince Saint Preux’s first thought when he heard he’d be fighting Yushin Okami at UFC Fight Night 117 was something like, “Oh yeah, that guy.”
Like the rest of the MMA world, Saint Preux (20-10 MMA, 8-5 UFC) was under the assumption that Okami (34-10 MMA, 13-5 UFC) was no longer in the UFC. And he wasn’t, until Mauricio “Shogun” Rua (25-10 MMA, 9-8 UFC) injured his knee, scratching him from a rematch in Saturday’s headliner.
“I was trying to figure out the last time he fought,” Saint Preux told MMAjunkie in advance of his FXX-televised fight opposite Okami at Saitama Super Arena in Saitama, Japan. “But I watched some of his fights before, and I was like, ‘Let’s make it happen.'”
Saint Preux wasn’t about to throw a full training camp and fight-night check out the door. Even if Okami was a curve ball, he figured it was a manageable one.
“At this point, the way I’m feeling right now is pretty unreal,” he said. “The way I’m able to push myself, I’m feeling great.”
That wasn’t the case in the spring of this past year, when Saint Preux was still reeling from a loss to now ex-champ Jon Jones in an interim UFC light heavyweight title bout at UFC 197. When he returned to the octagon six months later, he felt out of step, which was a bad place to be against slugger Jimi Manuwa. After a knockout loss, he tried to reboot four months later and instead fell short on points to upstart Volkan Oezdemir.
“The biggest thing I learned from my losses is you can have all the physical attributes, but if you’re not there mentally, you can get in trouble,” Saint Preux said.
In April, the 34-year-old veteran got his head straight. Good thing, because he tore through Marcos Rogerio de Lima to snap his slide and save his UFC job.
Now, Saint Preux is trying to get momentum back while there’s still time. With Jones facing another long suspension, there’s a path back to the title that ends with champ Daniel Cormier.
A second win over ex-champ Rua might have offered Saint Preux a bigger career boost than Okami. But these days, Saint Preux is trying not to complicate things too much.
“My mindset for the fight is just to fight,” he said. “At the end of the day, a fight is a fight. Guys have different styles, and my thing is to overwhelm people. And that’s what I’m going to do.”
Check out the above video as Saint Preux discusses the switch from Rua to Okami, lessons learned in the fight game, and his plans for the future.
For more on UFC Fight Night 117, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.
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