As you might expect, Hungarian welterweight Mate Kertesz is excited to be facing his second straight UFC veteran when he takes on Leandro “Apollo” Silva at Oktagon 63 this weekend.
As a veteran fighter himself, however, Kertesz (15-7, 1NC), with 15 years in the sport now, has both a professional side, and “fan” side. And when it comes to the fighter who will make the walk this Saturday, he’s a little more reserved when it comes to the match-up.
“Everybody has a professional side, and the fanbase side. That kind of self, who loves the sport and who is watching it since I was a child, I’m getting excited when I’m fighting a guy who was in the UFC,” Kertesz told Cageside Press in a recent exclusive interview. “But if I’m thinking like the professional side, I’m doing this sport since when I was 16-years old, so it’s almost like- ooh, I’m old, almost like 15 years now. Okay, I’m there where I have to be.”
Silva is the next man up. The last one was Niklas Stolze, a German UFC alum whom Kertesz submitted with a rear-naked choke – the first submission victory of his professional MMA career.
It was a long time coming, clearly. “That was, I would say like the hardest, because I really like grappling, but usually in MMA, I’m a safe player. So if we do grappling, I go for the top position, I go for the ground n’ pound, for the points, and so on and this kind of stuff.”
Kertesz took some ribbing from his jiu-jitsu buddies, who jokingly questioned why he bothered training BJJ techniques if he wasn’t going to use them. “Finally I was there, I’d seen the opportunity and I took it. It was good, it was a good feeling. It’s also like time; you have to get really sharp to notice those little mistakes that the other guy is doing, and then if you’re there, you go for it with 100 percent.”
Leandro Silva is a veteran of over 40 fights who has fought in the UFC against the likes of Drew Dober and Francisco Trinaldo. At 38, he’s seen just about everything, believes Kertesz.
“Because of this much experience, definitely he will be calm. It will be a situation that he’d already been in, so I would say you have to be a little bit more clever than your opponent,” Kertesz suggested. “It’s a game at the end of the day.”
Keen eyed fight fans may notice that the bout is set for 80kg, or just north of 175lbs, rather than welterweight. The reason for that boils down to timing. “I was waiting for a fight since March, my last fight, and like three weeks ago, Oktagon told me nobody wants to fight me. And the guys like Leandro, who would like to fight me, is three weeks away from the fight, so they want to do a catchweight.”
Kertesz reached out to Silva personally over Instagram, and the pair worked out the 80kg catchweight between them. The fight, however, will likely still count towards their welterweight rankings, with the pair both in Oktagon’s top 10. And while former title challenger Kertesz isn’t “the biggest guy at welterweight” nor doing “huge weight cuts,” he added that “80kg I think is the limit.”
If all goes well at Oktagon 63, Mate Kertesz hopes that a win “will shoot me to the title shot. There will be the fight, [Kaik] Brito against [Ion] Surdu, and with the win over Leandro, I think I could be the next challenger for the winner for the Brito and Surdu fight.”
Ideally, Mate Kertesz is hoping to claim the Oktagon welterweight title, defend it, and move on to the biggest stage in the sport. “Get the Oktagon welterweight belt, and have a couple fights in the UFC also. That would be a really good MMA, mixed martial arts career. And after it, maybe my own gym.”
Watch our full interview with Oktagon 63’s Mate Kertesz above.
