Despite having dispatched Mike Perry with a head kick only minutes earlier, Geoff Neal was serene backstage at UFC 245.
Las Vegas, NV — Welterweight Geoff Neal was looking fresh and lively backstage at the T-Mobile Arena Saturday night in Las Vegas, following his 90-second destruction of ‘Platinum’ Mike Perry. No surprise, given the length of the fight and the success he had, stopping Perry with a well-placed head kick and a few follow-up punches.
“I feel great. I could fight right now,” Neal told reporters including Cageside Press.
His calm demeanor has turned heads in the past, and did so again Saturday. In way of explanation, Neal admitted that “people that know me from back in high school, or have seen me drunk, I’m crazy. This personality is something that’s taken work, taken time. I think serving actually helped me get this personality.”
Neal spent a long time working as a server to help supplement his MMA career, though he’s recently switched to training full time. Still, there was that, plus his time at Fortis MMA. “You can’t go in there acting like a jackass.”
Ahead of the fight, Perry seemed to be on his best behavior, until weigh-ins anyway. Asked if that was perhaps to lull Neal into a false sense of security, he answered “maybe, because when I walked in the cage he had like a death look. He was looking like he was going to come out there and try to take my head off. I was like ‘okay, so this is what we’re doing?’ So I just gave him a death look right back.”
The outcome was all that mattered in the end, however. And despite the excellent result, Neal also knows that he’s still a work in progress. “There’s always something that can be worked on. More combinations, work on my movement, gotta start doing more wrestling, don’t want to get exposed there. I feel like my wrestling’s really good, but you never know until you go against somebody better than you.”
He’ll take a bit of time off to celebrate first, however. A celebration that will involve “liquor,” he joked. “There’s a bottle of Vodka in my room, I’m going to chug it, and see where the night takes me.”
Watch the full UFC 245 post-fight press scrum with Geoff Neal above!
