Featherweight Steve Garcia returns to action at UFC 287 on Saturday night in Miami, where he takes on China’s Shayilan Nuerdanbieke.
When Garcia enters the cage at the Miami-Dade Arena, he’ll do so off a big performance in his last outing, that saw him knock out Chase Hooper in all of a minute and a half. A performance big enough to land Garcia his first Performance of the Night bonus in the UFC, in fact.
The Contender Series vet is now 2-2 in the UFC, and got a fair amount of positive feedback from fans after the Hooper win.
“I definitely got a lot of thumbs up, a lot of compliments, a lot of good jobs, proud of yous, and they come from all the way around— from people I don’t know, from people that probably didn’t like me, to all of it,” Garcia told The Top Turtle Podcast on Cageside Press recently. “So it’s kind of cool, but at the end of the day, I’m here to do a job, and he’s just one of many to come.”
As for the $50,000 in bonus money, Garcia admitted that “I had big dreams for it,” though he ultimately chose to be a little more responsible.
“I was planning to get an RV with it, but I figured I’d just be smart, and I just got the things that I could definitely use,” Garcia explained. “And so I bought my family a new fridge, I bought me a really nice treadmill and stuff. I reinvest in myself as much as I can. Honestly I’ll wait for the next bonus to maybe buy my RV.”
The RV will have to wait for the next bonus, which Garcia believes will come.
“Every single time, it will be the goal, but ultimately just win. The Performance bonus will follow, and it will come but I’m on a humongous card, and all these guys are amazing athletes. Great fighters. I know it’s tough to get them. So I’ve just got to focus on winning, and then everything else will fall into place as long as I do what I’m supposed to do that night.”
For the fight with Nuerdanbieke, Garcia has been working on his wrestling, while trying to “smooth out the corners” and stay well-rounded. But, he added, “the writing’s on the wall. My striking is probably my highest attribute. This is really a style match-up.”
“I’m not saying Shayilan can’t strike with me or anything like that, because he’s shown [he can] strike with a couple of his previous opponents. His last fight was kind of weird, but the ones prior to that, he uses his striking really to set up the takedowns. And this is a striker versus wrestler type of fight for us. It’s nothing I haven’t seen before. When I fought at 35 I fought so many of these guys because a lot of 35’ers are wrestlers. This is something that I have seen before, it’s nothing new.”
The plan, if Garcia can stymie Nuerdanbieke’s wrestling, is that “he’s going to be in a lot of pain. Every position, every single thing, he’s just going to get hit with something,” the featherweight told us. “He’s going to be uncomfortable the whole entire fight. That is going to be my biggest thing, just make him uncomfortable. Make him work for every single thing that he tries to do, and make him pay for every shot he does.”
Once that all comes into play, “then I’m going to start having my way with him, and I’ll be able to impose my will. You’re going to see a finish at some point.”
