Miami — With a baby girl on the way, UFC 327’s Jiri Prochazka believes he’s a more dangerous fighter than ever.
“Yes for sure,” he said when asked that exact question during the UFC 327 media day in Miami this week.
Prochazka (32-5-1) is looking to become a two-time light heavyweight champion after Alex Pereira vacated his title in favor of a move to heavyweight. Opposite him this Saturday at the Kaseya Center will be City Kickboxing’s Carlos Ulberg, who sits on a nine-fight win streak.
Ulberg’s kickboxing style is something that Prochazka, likewise known for his standup, welcomes.
“For sure I like this match-up, because Carlos is a great standup fighter. I like to fight standup,” Prochazka told media outlets including Cageside Press.
“He proved that he’s a really good striker. In movement, he has good movement, precise punches. I think in the standup, from all my opponents, this one, Ulberg is, with this, his style is very specific, very systematic. Really somebody who right now I need to face to push my standup up.”
There is a longtime narrative that Jiri Prochazka is a slow starter, something that has dogged him since his arrival in the UFC. That’s been a focus ahead of the Ulberg fight, with the key, according to Prochazka, being to figure out “how to unlock this primal aggression inside myself, to go there in the fight like the second round. To start the first round like the second round.”
Fatherhood, meanwhile, has Prochazka thinking more about responsibility.
“Since I knew that there will be a new life in my life, and I will be a father, first came a big, lot of thoughts about responsibility, about the end of my free time and all these things. But I don’t have free time, everything is about the fight, about the preparation. So I started to work more to believe, to my girlfriend, that we can handle that. I started to work on our relationship, to be more deeply connected and to understand each other more.”
As Prochazka later put it, “to be a father is not just about one person, it’s parents.”
Watch the full UFC 327 media day appearance by Jiri Prochazka above.
