The first stint in the UFC didn’t exactly go as planned for Modestas Bukauskas. After a TKO win in his debut, he lost three straight which included a freak knee injury due to an oblique kick. After that run, Bukauskas feels like a lot of people had put a nail in his career’s coffin. However, there are a lot of factors that he feels were overlooked with those struggles.
“I think a lot of people thought my career was over. Everyone thought that I was done,” Bukauskas explained. “But I was fighting with a knee injury, basically just rehabbing a knee injury since 2019. This is before I even got signed to the UFC.”
After the blunt force that took the knee injury from bad to worse, Bukauskas was finally forced to stop and take care of it. Now that he has, he feels like he’s on the right track to get back to where he belongs and shut the doubters up.
“Now everything is finally fixed. I just beat one very good guy [Lee Chadwick]. Now if I beat another home grown talent from the USA – it’ll definitely be a massive statement,” he said.
That chance against an American prospect comes this Saturday at Cage Warriors 148. HE faces Chuck Campbell for the Cage Warriors vacant light heavyweight belt that he vacated himself before heading to the UFC. Should he complete the task at hand, he thinks the phone should be ringing sooner rather than later.
“Looking at the landscape of the light heavyweight division at the minute, I could definitely mix things up really nicely for [the UFC],” Bukauskas said. “I think [this win] would definitely be enough to warrant a second shot at the big show.”
The light heavyweight title fight will serve as the co-main event to Cage Warriors 148. That card takes place this Saturday on UFC’s Fight Pass.
You can hear the entire audio of this interview below at 2:05.
