Mario Piazzon returns to Dana White’s Contender Series with another shot at earning a UFC deal, and he likes the atmosphere built around his heavyweight clash with Guilherme Uriel on Aug. 25 in Las Vegas.
The Brazilian heavyweight duo will collide Saturday night at the Meta Apex, and there seems to be bad blood between camps. Piazzon and Uriel touched foreheads during the final face-off following Monday’s official weigh-ins.
“He blocked me and everyone around me on Instagram, but I kept my Instagram exactly
the way it was,” Piazzon told MMA Fighting. “I’ve never said anything about him. From my side, there’s nothing, but if he looks at me differently when the time comes, things are going to get ugly. I’m already going to be throwing down on Tuesday like that, so imagine if he looks at me the wrong way. It’s going to start at the faceoff.”
Piazzon had similar experience on his first DWCS appearance in September 2023, when he left victorious after Alexander Soldatkin was disqualified for landing an illegal knee in the third round. Piazzon said the Russian and his team were acting cocky and disrespectful throughout fight week.
“I like that hostile atmosphere,” Piazzon said. “Last season, Soldatkin would walk past me with a lot of attitude. He would disrespect me, look at me like I was nothing. Serghei Spivac was with him, and he would look at me and disrespect me too, and that started making me really angry. I was like, fuck, he’s not going to have all those guys around him on Tuesday. It’s just going to be me and him there. Once that cage closes, we’re going to throw down. There won’t be anyone else, and he’s going to see that he can’t just keep looking at me like that.”
Neither fighter signed with the UFC that night, but Piazzon felt that “opportunity” helped him get better in many aspects.
“It was a mix of emotions,” Piazzon said of competing on DWCS in 2023. “I went into it thinking it was the opportunity of my life, against a very tough guy. That was the toughest heavyweight fight on that season. He was the guy who was about to get into the UFC, and I was the biggest underdog that night. The difference between us in the odds was huge. I went in, trusted my work and my team. I came out of there with the experience that I’m tough too, that I’m good too. I believe in myself, and I have the potential to be fighting among the top 15 in the UFC.”
The road back to DWCS was a long one, enough time for Piazzon to suffer a brutal upset loss in Brazil and rebound from that. Piazzon’s third post-DWCS fight was a clash with MMA journeyman Alex Junius in Sao Paulo, and he was stopped in under three minutes by a fighter who had lost 20 of his previous 24 fights for a record of 15-39.
“It was the biggest learning experience of my life, man,” Piazzon said. “I really needed to go through that loss. I was on a run where I kept winning, winning, winning, and I thought I was unbeatable. And it happened against a guy that, today, I know that if we fought 10 times, I’d beat him 11 times. But I also took a huge lesson from it. There’s no reason to underestimate another person. There’s another fighter in there who is chasing his dream too. I just wasn’t myself. I was more apathetic. That loss made me better as a person. Not just as an athlete, but I think the biggest change I went through was as a person.”
Since then, Piazzon won’t enter any fight thinking it’s going to be an easy win. That doesn’t mean, however, he’s not confident in his skills against Uriel, who was finished by Josh Hokit in his previous Contender Series fight in 2025.
“I don’t like underestimating anyone,” Piazzon said. “He’s doing his job, just like I am, but there are levels in this sport. I had a very tough journey to get back to Contender Series. Guilherme is a tough guy and all that, but once I get my hands on him, he won’t stay on his feet. When I take him down, I’m going to slice his face open.”
