Bellator 207’s Ryan Bader isn’t looking past Matt Mitrione, his opponent in Friday’s Bellator Heavyweight Grand Prix semi-final, but he admits he wants to defend both the heavyweight and light heavyweight titles should he win the tournament.
Ryan Bader meets Matt Mitrione in the first of two Heavyweight Grand Prix semi-finals at back-to-back Bellator events this weekend. Bader vs. Mitrione headlines Bellator 207 on Friday at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, Connecticut. It’s a stellar card, with Roy Nelson meeting Sergei Kharitonov, and Lorenz Larkin fighting as well. Yet all eyes will be on the main event, to see whether Bellator light heavyweight champ Bader can take out his much larger buddy, and natural heavyweight Mitrione.
Mitrione, of course, was the favorite to win the entire grand prix. “Coming in, Matt was the favorite to win the whole thing. Now I’m facing that guy who was number one at one time,” Bader told reporters at Tuesday’s Bellator 207 and 208 media call.
Despite the ranking, however, Bader insists that “the lines and stuff don’t matter. This is MMA. Big guys, small gloves, it takes one millimeter to be out of position, and you get caught with a big punch.” It’s unquestionably true, especially at heavyweight. “This sport’s crazy, that’s why people love it,” he pointed out. “It’s entertaining, you don’t know what’s going to happen. The lines and all that, they mean nothing to me.”
Nor does the argument that he’s undersized for the tournament. “I wasn’t putting much stock into the whole ‘I need to be heavier, I need to do this,'” argument, he revealed. “I went about what I usually do.” The only change, “I probably put on about ten pounds of lean muscle. I wanted to do that, I wanted to see how I perform, how I reacted, how my body took that on, and it did great. I was up at almost 240lbs at one point in this camp. That was probably four weeks ago.”
He’s dropped a bit of that since, and is now “around 230, 233, 235, and I feel great. I feel like I’m faster than ever.”
“My cardio is the best ever. I’m healthy. Most importantly, I had a great camp and I’m coming into this fight 100% healthy,” Bader stated.
Going back to the size question, with Mitrione being one of the biggest figures in the Grand Prix, Bader downplayed the discrepancy between them. “You know he might come in 10, 15 pounds heavier. Who cares? I’m in there with bigger guys all the time. I want to keep my attributes that make me good. I don’t want to lose that trying to gain some sloppy poundage.”
“Defending both [light heavyweight and heavyweight titles] would be the real accomplishment.” – Ryan Bader
Not only that, but Bader wants to ensure, when all is said and done, he gets the credit he’s due should he go all the way. “I want to fight the heavyweights, I want to fight the best heavyweights in the tournament,” he said. “If I go through this and I fight nothing but light heavyweights, it’s kind of diminished a little bit. So I get to go in there and fight the guy they said was going to win the whole thing, at heavyweight.”
Should Bader win the Grand Prix, he plans on hanging on to both straps, something two-division champions in other promotions have struggled to do (ONE Championship’s Martin Nguyen recently vacated his lightweight title, while hanging on to their featherweight belt). Ryan told Cageside Press on Tuesday’s call that “I’m getting kind of spoiled not having to cut weight and all that, but I do want to keep both, I want to defend both. Getting through this tournament and I end up winning the belt is an accomplishment in and of itself, but defending both would be the real accomplishment.”
He’s refusing to look too far ahead, however. “I’m kind of taking the tournament one at a time,” Bader told us. “What I do like about this bracketed-style tournament is that there’s no outside variable that is going to get somebody a title shot. If you win the fight in front of you, you move on.” That’s something very familiar to Bader, with his wrestling background.
“For me, right now, my mindset is to go out and win this fight, first and foremost. And that’s it. But looking down the road, yeah I want to get both belts for sure, that’s the gold mine, and I want to defend both, and see what happens from there.”
Interestingly enough, neither men were told outright what the plan was if the other was injured prior to the fight. “No, I never had a conversation about it,” Mitrione told us, while Bader acknowledged that he found out via the media that Cheick Kongo was the likely alternate. Just days out, however, it appears all systems are go for the first of two huge main events for Bellator MMA this weekend.
Bellator 207 takes place Friday, October 12 at the Mohegan Sun Arena in Uncasville, CT. The card airs live and free on Paramount Network.
