Las Vegas, NV — “I guess this answers all the nose questions,” Dricus Du Plessis said with a laugh following UFC 290 on Saturday night.
The South African middleweight had surgery on his nose recently to improve his breathing, after years of essentially having to suck back oxygen through his mouth while fighting. Early on in Saturday’s battle with Robert Whittaker, Du Plessis still appeared to be breathing through his mouth a little, probably a hard habit to break. But he got the job done either way, scoring the upset by battering ex-champ Robert Whittaker, en route to a TKO finish in the second.
In terms of what openings Du Plessis saw from Whittaker in the fight, he admitted there weren’t many. “One thing was, I was big against Rob tonight. I could feel it when we were in the grappling exchanges, in the wrestling exchanges. I was strong,” Du Plessis (20-2) told Cageside Press. “I could feel I was a lot stronger than him physically, but he’s fast. And his footwork is so good. He makes you miss all the time, and until I figured that out, his movements are the same constantly. I brought in a lot of karate guys for this camp, we did, and it worked so well. Because I figured out that movement— but he does it so well.”
With the win over Whittaker, Du Plessis became just the second man to both beat, and finish, the ex-champ in the UFC middleweight division. The other? Champ Israel Adesanya, who Du Plessis will face next.
The pair faced off in the cage after Du Plessis got the win, a situation the South African also commented on Saturday.
“The only thing I made of that is, it’s usually the contender that goes into the cage, right? So even he sees me as the champion already. He even knows that I’m the champion. Now that he’s seen me in that cage, he knows what a force I am in there. He could feel the energy and I could feel how insignificant he is to me when we get in that cage.”
There is a whole lot of bad blood between Dricus Du Plessis and Israel Adesanya at this point. Earlier this year, Du Plessis claimed that he was the African fighter in the UFC, and would be the one to bring a belt home to Africa. Adesanya, a Nigerian-born fighter living in New Zealand, did not take kindly to those words. During Saturday’s face-off, Adesanya, who is black, hurled about a half-dozen n-bombs in Du Plessis’ direction.
Though Adesanya had been cheered when he entered the octagon, the reaction when he left was mixed at best. There are a whole lot of historical and racial undertones to the pairing — especially given South Africa’s history of apartheid, only repealed in the early 90s. So just how is Dricus Du Plessis going to handle what could turn into a very dark build-up to his first UFC title fight?
“You saw it tonight, I’m prepared. I’m prepared for everything. Everything he says, anything— He’s behaving like a clown in there,” Du Plessis exclaimed. “That’s not how a champion behaves. That’s not how a man behaves. He’s behaving like a child. Conduct yourself like a champion. There’s people looking up to you and you’re behaving like that? Nah.”
“If that sells tickets, good for him. I’ll sell tickets my way. I’m a gentleman, I’m a man. And I’ll behave like a man.”
As for the fight itself, it seems Du Plessis expects to have his way with the two-time UFC middleweight champion. “I’ll knock him out, just like I did tonight. If not, we saw his fight with Alex Pereira. If I get him to the floor, it is not even a fight. It’s not even a fight. If I just get my hands on him, it’s not even a fight. I will manhandle him. I’ve done it before and I’ll do it again.”
Watch the full UFC 290 post-fight press conference with Dricus Du Plessis above.
