Dricus du Plessis has his chance to face another former champion at UFC Oklahoma City, but it wasn\u2019t an easy negotiation according to the South African star.<\/p>\n
With the July 18 event two weeks away, the UFC only recently made a middleweight main event bout between du Plessis and Kamaru Usman official. Du Plessis had previously hinted that a \u201clittle someone\u201d was delaying the announcement of the fight<\/a> and he confirmed he was taking a shot at Usman in an interview with Fight Forecast.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cHe didn\u2019t want to sign the contract, I know that for a fact,\u201d du Plessis said. \u201cI spoke to the UFC and they said, \u2018We finally convinced him to sign.\u2019 If you need convincing to sign, that\u2019s a problem, but I can\u2019t blame him, I would also not want to fight me right now. It would be the smart move not to sign the fight, but let\u2019s go.\u201d<\/p>\n Usman is widely regarded as one of the best welterweights of all time, having won his first 15 UFC fights, a run that included a championship win in 2019 followed by five successful title defenses. He has competed once at middleweight, losing a close decision to Khamzat Chimaev, and now seems determined to earn a shot at gold at 185 pounds.<\/p>\n At 39, Usman may be past his prime, but du Plessis still sees him as a worthy challenge and one that will prove he\u2019s shored up his weaknesses after being out-wrestled by Chimaev and losing his middleweight belt at UFC 319 .<\/p>\n \u201cYou think you\u2019ve been waiting? I\u2019ve been waiting,\u201d du Plessis said. \u201cWe\u2019ve been talking about the fight for a long time, he\u2019s mentioned the fight way before we made the fight and I said, \u2018Well, cool. I\u2019ll take that fight.\u2019 Now people will say, \u2018Why don\u2019t you fight [Nassourdine] Imavov?\u2019 I don\u2019t mind that fight either. I want to fight somebody that gets me to my title again. Kamaru Usman, yes, he\u2019s a bit older, but now you look at what [Justin] Gaethje just did, so that throws that argument out the window immediately.<\/p>\n \u201dKamaru Usman is arguably the best welterweight ever alongside with Georges St-Pierre if you go on title defenses and all that\u2026 He has a win over Sean Strickland, he had that very close fight with Khamzat Chimaev and that\u2019s why I wanted this fight. What\u2019s it going to mean for me to go out there and beat another striker? I\u2019ve done that many times, I\u2019ve defended my belt against strikers. I\u2019ve beaten the best, which is Strickland, at middleweight, twice. So, why go out there and fight another striker? People are going to be like, \u2018OK, we know you can strike, what about the wrestling and grappling?\u201d because of my last fight. I want to go out there and prove what I\u2019ve done. Go out and figure this out and go show the problem that the middleweights have on their hands now because now I am more complete\u2014and I was a complete fighter\u2014but now I am complete in all areas and I can\u2019t wait to go and show that.\u201d<\/p>\n Prior to the loss to Chimaev, du Plessis was on his way to establishing himself as one of the all-time greats himself. He went 6-0 to start his UFC career, then rattled off wins over fellow middleweight stars Robert Whittaker, Sean Strickland, Israel Adesanya, and Strickland again, with those last three bouts being championship fights.<\/p>\n Du Plessis has been on the shelf since August and is eager to bounce back from his first UFC loss.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s been long,\u201d du Plessis said. \u201cI was supposed to fight in April, got the injury. I think that was all for a reason because the fire in me to get back in there is like never before.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dricus du Plessis has his chance to face another former champion at UFC Oklahoma City, but it wasn\u2019t…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":783147,"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-783146","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\/783146","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=783146"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/783146\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/783147"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=783146"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=783146"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=783146"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}