Las Vegas — If there’s one thing you don’t want to do ahead of fighting on the Contender Series, it’s miss weight. Unfortunately for English bantamweight Louis Lee Scott, he did just that this week.
Luckily for Scott, he managed to pull off the unlikely, wining his fight on the show, and securing a UFC contract to boot. It’s a situation Scott addressed while speaking with media outlets including Cageside Press following the bout at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas.
“Pretty surreal, to be honest. I feel like I’m going to wake up, and I’m in a dream. It’s one of them. I’m gasping, I feel pretty ill to be honest,” Scott (10-0) stated.
Scott admitted that, while sitting backstage following the bout, he’d been thinking “I’m going to throw up, I’m going to throw up.” Then Dana White announced he’d got the UFC contract. “It’s great. It’s great.”
The weight miss saw Scott come in a pound and a half heavy, then get the green light to shed more weight. The extra hour saw him drop another pound, but he couldn’t quite hit the mark.
“It’s never happened before, it’ll never happen again. I can say loads of things,” said Scott. “I’ve never traveled this far to fight before, and obviously flying 12 hours and two flights to get here, making you hold water and all that, I’d come into fight week heavier than I ever had been.”
Then, just a few hours into his weight cut, he took ill. “Throwing up, my heart rate was through the roof, your body gets anxious, you just stop sweating. So there was like a five hour gap where I didn’t sweat.”
By the time he got back to a point where weight was coming off again, “I didn’t have long enough to make it. I literally did everything I could. We missed by what, like two pounds at first? And then I had an hour extra, and I sat in the sauna for an hour straight, literally sat there sweating, chewing pieces of ice. And we missed by less than half a pound. So it is what it is, but it’ll never happen again.”
Having missed, however, Scott understood the assignment. Cruising to a decision wasn’t going to cut it. And so he put away fellow undefeated (until that point) bantamweight Kaushik Saikumar in the third round.
“I knew at that point, I have got to put in a serious performance. I’ve got to show him how good I am, I need to be undeniable in my performance.” Scott wasn’t sure if he’d done so, “but that don’t matter, I got it. And now I can show how good I am.”
Watch the full Dana White’s Contender Series 2025 Week 2 post-fight appearance by Louis Lee Scott above.
