Newark, NJ — Heavyweight Waldo Cortes-Acosta, a Dominican who started his career as a baseball player before making the jump to MMA, came away from UFC 316 on Saturday with arguably the biggest win of his career.
Cortes-Acosta (14-1), ranked #11 in the admittedly thin weight class, earned a decision victory over Serghei Spivac, several spots ahead of him at #7. The win puts him on a five-fight win streak and will almost certainly see him land inside the top 10 when the rankings update later this week.
For “Salsa Boy,” the result was the payoff for weeks of grueling effort that saw him working on his ground game harder than ever. “We would actually train to the point that I had nothing on me. To the actual point that my teammates had to grab me and just get me back up again, because I couldn’t get up,” he told media outlets including Cageside Press following the bout at the Prudential Center in Newark, NJ. “This would happen three to four times a week, it was very intense and the result was what you saw. I was able to come out with a win.”
Having it all come together the way it, did, “first and foremost I feel very proud of myself, for what I’ve been able to do. For the fact that everything we put into camp, all the training, all the drills and everything we put in actually turned into a victory and we were able to put it all together in the octagon in real life,” Cortes-Acosta added.
With his background as a pitcher, which took him from the Dominican Republic to the United States, Waldo Cortes-Acosta clearly knows the value of hard work. After all, he wasn’t born a fighter, it was something he had to develop into.
“I always tell people, I’m very happy with the support that I’m given, that I’ve been receiving. And I always give back the same amount of support that I get from everybody. And I always tell people, keep having at it, keep going at it, because I wasn’t born fighting, I didn’t grow up fighting. I turned to fighting after baseball at age 25, and then I had to learn. I had to learn how to grapple, I had to learn how to wrestle, I had to learn how to punch and actually exchange and little by little you start learning things and bringing in new things, and here I am.”
Watch the full UFC 316 post-fight press conference appearance by Waldo Cortes-Acosta above.
