YouTube<\/a> page on Monday showing scenes from his camp and hanging out with family and friends, and his parents are shown giving a speech at home before dinner on Saturday.<\/p>\n\u201cThis is the biggest fight of his life but we\u2019ve said that there or four other times,\u201d John Ray Gaethje said. \u201cHe\u2019s fighting another little short guy, and he\u2019s done really well against [Michael] Chandler and [Rafael] Fiziev, and a few others. I just see the same thing happening for this fight. This is what we trained for. This is what he put his whole life into since he was 4 years old. I\u2019m excited and ready for it to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n
Topuria saw the clip on social media and reacted with a message to the Gaethje family.<\/p>\n
\u201cFathers hope. Champions know,\u201d Topuria wrote. \u201cI\u2019ve heard this story before: bigger men, stronger men, better men. Men who said I was just a small guy who was about to get a lesson in humility. They all learned the truth the same way. Your son already knows who I am. On June 14th, you will too. 18-0 PAPA\u201c<\/p>\n
Topuria is 17-0 as a professional with his last win being at 155 pounds, a first-round knockout over Charles Oliveira to claim the vacant title. He was sidelined from action to deal with personal issues, and Gaethje won the interim belt beating Paddy Pimblett this past January.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Ilia Topuria and Justin Gaethje will unify the UFC lightweight titles in the main event of UFC White…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":710621,"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-710620","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\/710620","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=710620"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/710620\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/710621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=710620"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=710620"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=710620"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}