London, England — Featherweight Jonathan Pearce greeted Makwan Amirkhani with a downpour of elbows early in their UFC London meeting on Saturday.
As he put it, “I used to mow yards, and I was just trying to get that lawnmower started, you know what I mean?”
Get it going he did, opening Amirkhani up en route to a second-round TKO. For Pearce (13-4), it was his fourth straight win inside the octagon.
“I don’t mow yards anymore; I retired, and now I just whup tail,” he exclaimed following the fight, speaking to media outlets including Cageside Press.
As for what comes next, he generally leaves it up to his coaches. Not that he’s worried about making a bad decision. “I think I’ll take on anybody, and that’s why I’m in the UFC,” he told one reporter. “Maybe top 15, or we’ll see what goes from here. If someone calls me out.”
In Pearce’s estimation, prior to the fight, Amirkhani was acting like a big guy, “wanting to be big on me, wanting to be the big brother.” Once they got down to business, however, “he wasn’t so big. So that’s what I thought of him. But I have a lot of respect for him, that’s why I bowed to him at the end. Because this is a gentleman’s sport.”
Pearce will now stick around London, getting a chance to see the sights over the next few days. That will be his way of celebrating the win, having accomplished exactly what he wanted to do on his trip to England. “My biggest thing was just to get on this mic and say ‘JSP’ and promote myself. This is what I want to do with my life, so I’m happy living it out.”
As for the Europe versus the rest of the world feel to the event, “I don’t really play into any of that,” Pearce told Cageside Press. “I worked my whole life for this opportunity, and I just want to go out there and show everybody what I’m capable of doing when I get out there.”
Watch the full UFC London post-fight press scrum with Jonathan Pearce above.
