Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) Lightweight fan favorite Chase Hooper picked up a much-needed win this past weekend, quickly strangling Mitch Ramirez in less than three minutes on the UFC Oklahoma City main card inside Paycom Center in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma (watch highlights).
And according to Hooper, it was not just another fight.
Hooper entered UFC Oklahoma City riding the first two-fight losing streak of his career, having been knocked out in back-to-back fights by Alexander Hernandez (watch highlights) and Lance Gibson Jr. For a 26-year-old who has basically grown up inside the Octagon, a third straight loss could have put his UFC future in serious danger.
“I told my wife, ‘I’m not losing three in a row. If I lose three fights in a row, I don’t deserve to be here. I need to figure something else out,’” Hooper told UFC.com after the fight. “It was very much a make-or-break moment for me, and it’s so nice because it’s been over a year since I won my last fight. It was the Jim Miller fight back in April of last year. So, it’s been over a year since I’ve been able to feel this.
“It’s a drug,” Hooper continued. “You crave it. It’s one of those things that was a make-or-break moment for me, and I told my wife, ‘If I lose this next fight, I’m going to get a job, back to normal,’ that type of stuff. But we’re here, and I’ll push those worries off. I still have the skill set. I still deserve to be here — and onto the next one.”
Props to Hooper for being that honest.
Plenty of fighters say every bout is important, but Hooper openly admitted that he viewed UFC Oklahoma City as a do-or-die moment for his career. And instead of trying to reinvent himself, he went back to what got him to UFC in the first place.
Hooper worked with longtime friend and recently retired UFC veteran Michael Chiesa during this training camp, and that influence clearly paid off.
“It was super validating to just know the thing that got me into the sport, the thing that got me here to the UFC, is what’s keeping me here,” Hooper said. “I had a really good talk with Michael Chiesa. I was on the card with him for his retirement fight. I went out to Spokane this camp, and I just wanted to take a couple plays out of his book and see how he did it.
“He made an entire career out of being a grappler, and he had tons of submission wins in his own right,” Hooper concluded. “I took a couple pages out of his playbook, and obviously, it worked out.”
Hooper needed less than three minutes to remind everyone that his ground game is still a problem, and more importantly, he snapped the worst skid of his UFC career before it got even uglier.
Now, Hooper wants to fight one more time before the end of the year.
Because he has a second baby on the way, and as he put it, “babies are expensive.”
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