Matheus Camilo had to deal with a lot of changes before securing his first octagon victory at UFC 322, which went down Nov. 15 at Madison Square Garden, New York.<\/p>\n
Camilo flew to Abu Dhabi in October but saw Abdul-Kareem Al-Selwady withdraw from UFC 321 just hours before the weigh-ins on Oct. 23. Camilo was promised a fight in November and stayed in shape hoping to be on the UFC APEX event the week after, but instead flew to New York for a massive pay-per-view undercard match versus Viacheslav Borshchev.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt was a mess, but it worked out,\u201d Camilo told MMA Fighting. \u201cThe first few days were really bad. It was just a few hours before weigh-ins when they told me the fight was off. I was already ready to start dehydrating \u2014 I still had about 4kg left, and I had already cut almost 9kg. I was really sad when I found out, it killed all the excitement to fight.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cSean Shelby asked if I wanted to fight on the November 8 card and I said yes. They changed my flight so I could get back to Las Vegas as soon as possible. I stayed on diet and didn\u2019t have an opponent, then they gave me an opponent completely different from the original one for a new date. There were a lot of changes but my desire to win made the difference.\u201d<\/p>\n
Camilo won a decision over Borshchev and returned home in Las Vegas with \u201can enormous feeling of gratitude\u201d for his first UFC victory. He still wasn\u2019t fully satisfied with his performance but happy given the circumstances, wondering why Borshchev was \u201cslippery as hell\u201d in the cage.<\/p>\n
\u201cI tried to hold him and the dude was slippery,\u201d Camilo said. \u201cI was going for a kimura on him and his arm kept slipping out. He already knew, for sure, that I was going to try to grapple with him. \u2026 I know he\u2019s a very experienced guy, very tough on the feet and on the ground. He surprised me on the ground. I thought it would be easy to take him down to try my ground game but he\u2019s a very experienced guy, so he surprised me.\u201d<\/p>\n
On top of that, Camilo also had to deal with an injury sustained early in the fight.<\/p>\n
\u201cI ended up injuring my foot in the first round,\u201d Camilo said. \u201cFew people know this, but on the second kick I threw, I hurt my foot and it was really painful. I couldn\u2019t even step on it. I had to deal with all of that in the cage, on top of the emotions. I wanted to show more, but that\u2019s how it went. Next time you\u2019ll see a new version of Matheus.\u201d<\/p>\n
Camilo turns 25 in January and is eager to show his potential in the UFC. At 1-1 in the organization, \u201cJaguar\u201d said he will gladly accept any name thrown his way to build a reputation for himself in the sport.<\/p>\n
\u201cI can\u2019t wait to get back in the octagon,\u201d Camilo said. \u201cI\u2019m young, I\u2019m hungry, and I can\u2019t wait to work. I like challenges. Whoever they put in front of me, I\u2019ll be ready to go to war, fight, and always win.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Matheus Camilo had to deal with a lot of changes before securing his first octagon victory at UFC…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":319490,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,85,787,1396],"class_list":["post-319489","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc","tag-ufc-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319489","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=319489"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/319489\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/319490"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=319489"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=319489"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=319489"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}