Las Vegas, NV — “I was in the fight, so I can’t remember that much,” Danny Chavez said with a laugh when asked about his win over T.J. Brown at UFC 252.
“What can I say, I came with a game plan and I was able to execute it,” was Chavez’s more serious answer, speaking to media outlets including Cageside Press post-fight. “I really wish I would have finished it in that second round when I dropped him. It sucks, I was on a win streak, finishing people and I wanted to show in my debut that I could finish guys in the 145lb division.”
In his promotional debut, he certainly showed he belongs in the UFC at least. Although he appeared a little worse for the wear.
“I’ll be back in the gym next week. I probably won’t be able to kick or move around, but I’ll hit the bag sitting down if I have to,” Chavez said. The plan moving forward is to fight again before the end of the year. Chavez is no fan of long stretches of time off.
“I trained 14 years for it. I’m here to fight. There’s been times in my career where I took so much time off, and I didn’t like that,” he recalled. “I like to be more consistent.”
The fight with Brown had a bit of heat going into it. Chavez’s opponent missed weight, if only by half a pound. Things came to a head at the weigh-in Friday in a brief confrontation. “He missed weight, and I was killing myself to make weight,” Chavez said of that encounter.
“This was my second weight cut within a month. I don’t want to say I struggled, but this was one of the hardest weight cuts I’ve had,” Chavez explained. “And I feel it’s because it was back-to-back weight cuts. And him not making weight got me a little mad. I got in his face and I told him ‘why couldn’t you make weight? I had two cuts in one month and I made weight, fool.'”
That said, following the fight there was nothing but respect from Chavez. “I’m not here to hate on him or anything. It was just in the moment.”
What’s next is more about when he fights than who for Danny Chavez. “At the end of the day I want to be a UFC champion. Where ever they put me. Put me with somebody in the top 20, where ever you want. I’m here to do my job. I’m here to come out and fight. If you want me to give you a name, I’ll give you anybody. I don’t want to give you a name, because there’s no point. Just give me anybody.”
What does matter to Chavez, however, is his Colombian heritage. “It means a lot. I was actually thinking about that right before I got in the cage,” he told Cageside Press.
“People talk about UFC jitters, I didn’t have it,” he said. But although born in the U.S., Chavez did feel the pressure of representing Colombia. Especially as his nickname is “The Colombian Warrior.”
“I know what it is going in with a lot of pressure, but this is the first time I had so many people from Colombia hitting me up,” he noted. “I was getting messages left and right on my [Instagram]. I had to represent.”
Watch the full UFC 252 post-fight press conference with Danny Chavez above.
