Alex Perez Faces Sumudaerji in Macau Main-Card Bout
Alex Perez is in Macau, China, this week to face Sumudaerji on the main card of Saturday’s UFC Fight Night at Galaxy Arena. It is the 34-year-old’s second overseas assignment in his last three outings, a rare stretch for a fighter whose first 34 mixed martial arts bouts all came in the United States.
Macau Fight Night Main Card
Perez’s trip puts him back on an international stage after a run that has taken him from Doha to Las Vegas and now to Macau. He fought in Qatar last November, then returned to Las Vegas for a meeting with Charles Johnson on the UFC 324 prelims at T-Mobile Arena before booking this trip against Sumudaerji.
That sequence matters because it marks a clear shift in where he has been competing. Before reaching the UFC, Perez never fought outside his home state, and through the first 34 fights of his career he stayed inside the United States. Macau is only the latest step in a recent run that has pushed him well beyond that pattern.
Alex Perez and Charles Johnson
The Las Vegas fight carried extra weight. Perez entered that bout coming off a loss to Asu Almabayev in November and was on the last fight of his contract. He also missed weight by two-and-a-half pounds, which cost him 25-percent of his purse and made him ineligible for post-fight bonuses.
Even with that backdrop, he said after stopping Johnson in the first round that the previous camp had been the toughest of his career. “I shot myself in the foot with some stuff, and you know how life is,” he said after the fight, adding, “Actions have consequences. I messed up and had some consequences, so working through all that stuff, so it was just on the personal side, a lot of battles going on.”
Sumudaerji in Macau
Late last week, Perez described the Macau trip with unusual bluntness. “I like it better when I’m coaching; I can enjoy the food and all that stuff, right?” he said. He followed that with, “I can’t complain though: I get to see the world, get to get paid to punch somebody in the face.”
The matchup now gives Perez a chance to keep building on a fight week that already looks different from the one that preceded Charles Johnson. He earned his UFC roster spot with a win during the first season of Dana White’s Contender Series, and this one arrives with the same basic question attached to it: whether the 34-year-old can turn another long trip into another result in the cage. He said it best when he described the contract-year pressure before the Johnson fight: “I always like to gamble on myself, so if you’re putting me in there on the last fight of my deal, I gotta go out there and show out? I’ll take those odds every day.”
