Jean Silva stopped Jose Delgado in the main event of Noche UFC this past weekend in Glendale, Ariz., and revealed he had to overcome a series of hurdles during camp.
Silva was originally scheduled to face former interim UFC featherweight champion Yair Rodriguez in a five-round bout, but Delgado stepped in with less than a month’s notice after the Mexican talent suffered an injury. That coincided with a cut Silva suffered over his right eye in training.
“Four weeks before the fight, I opened [a cut
over] my eye,” Silva said on a video posted on his YouTube channel. “The day after I had the cut, I got the news that my opponent had been changed. With my eye cut, I thought, ‘Damn, changing opponents now, with my eye like this, what’s it going to be like?’ But all right, I closed my eye and trusted my team.”
Silva revealed he had also battled an infection in his shin earlier in camp, being unable to land kicks in training due to another injury.
“After my shin got better, I broke a toe, the one next to the big toe,” Silva said. “There was nothing I could do about it, so we kept training. After that, I started feeling something in my hip, but those were things that never made me stop training, never, but they did make me change the way I trained.”
“After that, I got knocked down in a boxing sparring session,” he continued. “It was nasty. Nasty. I took one that was very similar, almost identical to the one in the fight, but I came back really well too and beat the guy up [laughs]. I had several problems.”
The Fighting Nerds featherweight said he had one of his best weight cuts so far in the UFC, making championship weight on Friday morning, but had difficulties when it came to rehydrating. Silva ended up vomiting a few times and being “really skinny” on Saturday, weighing around 161 pounds — with clothes and shoes on — when he arrived at the arena.
It was the first main event of Delgado’s UFC career, and Silva said he felt the Arizona-native was “scared.” Delgado had a better start in the fight, though, hurting Silva on the feet, but the Brazilian turned things around in rounds two and three before forcing Delgado to tap to a choke.
“Everybody gives me shit like, ‘Man, what a crazy first round,’” Silva said. “Look, it was really risky, but I’m only going to become champion because I take more risks than all of you who criticize me. We knew this could happen. We had rehearsed every scenario. Not what we wanted to happen, but what could happen.
“I see him start talking in front of me. But he’s not talking to me, he’s singing. I had seen that before. When he’s trying to get back into the fight or do something new, he loosens up and starts singing. When I saw him singing in front of me, I thought, ‘Oh.’ As far as his strikes go, every single one was something we already knew about. We trained to take that body kick and for me not to move. As for the knockdown, we trained a lot specifically to avoid it because it’s a shot that comes straight down the middle. I had already been knocked down in training that way. It was my stupidity for not paying attention to it.”
“The only time the strategy went off track was at the moment of the knockdown, but my corner was paying attention the whole time,” Silva continued. “The strategy was executed really well, and I’m very happy. This reward is going to be immortalized, and it’s going to motivate me for the next reward, which is the belt, so I can stick to the strategy and bring that belt to Brazil, to you guys. It’s going to happen.”
Silva also explained his post-fight run-in with Delgado, denying the allegations that he tried to slap his opponent after barking at him.
“He said he was going to kill the dog, calling it a mask, and nobody said anything,” Silva said. “When I got up and started barking in his face, suddenly there were 20 videos saying that I tried to slap him in the face. If you go back and look at my fights, when guys go down semi-conscious, giving up, I never go after them. Westin Wilson was right in front of me. I could have taken his head off with so many elbows, and I didn’t. I asked the referee, and the referee told me to keep going, so I threw elbows to his ribs so I wouldn’t hit him in the head.
“Do you really think I would slap a guy who was on the ground? ‘Oh, but you did that to Diego [Lopes].’ Man, that’s different. He was insulting my team. As long as I’m not dead, I’m going to defend my people. Right there, when I went to bark at him, he turned around with everything he had, the referee pushed me, I slipped, and it looked like my hand was on his face.”
