Our Brazil UFC Title Fight Trip 2023 part 1

When I found out Glover's next fight was going to be a fight for the title, I was very happy. When I found out, Glover's title fight was gonna be all the way in Brazil, I was not very happy.  My gorgeous wife knows how nervous I get before flight, and how much I hate to travel, so between the travel and the Title Fight, she knew I was a wreck and thank God she agreed to come with me. We found out about eight weeks before the fight.

The weeks leading up to the fight I didn't go out to Connecticut for this camp, it was kind of a last-minute announcement, and he had just got through with training a bunch of his fighters, including one of his fighters Alex Pereira, won the UFC, middleweight title, so Glover has pretty much been in a pseudo-camp for the past three or four months. so while I didn't spend much time with him, physically, we would talk on the phone, text, and he would send me videos of him sparring, and I would give input. But it was still very stressful, leading up to it, and to be honest more for me than for him.

My wife and I left on a Monday for Brazil, and we arrived in Brazil Tuesday around noon. The flight was OK, but it is never a fun or relaxing funny 20-hour flight. My wife always gets the window seat, I get the middle seat, that's just kind of an unspoken rule in our marriage. But all things considered, except for a few delayed flights and having to run across all of the Houston airport, which is huge, there were no other real hiccups on this trip.

I arrived Tuesday and started observing Glover's fight week preparation. He was very relaxed and laid-back, and it seemed like everything was going great in his camp.

Since all of the UFC's pay-per-view fights work around Pacific time, for some reason, maybe it's their largest crowd.  Glover's flight was scheduled for 2 AM, so I report time wasn't until 11 PM for the bus to take us to the arena. Everything in the dressing room and all of the pre-fight activities went very smoothly. Glover seemed to be in great spirits unfortunately the fighter that we shared the dressing room with got a very bad beating in her fight, and watching that on the TV in the dressing room Was pretty disheartening. Then having the semi-main event, being a non-Brazilian fighter versus a Brazilian fighter, so the crowd was on fire. They were jumping up and down, yelling terrible things, pounding their seats, and throwing beer at the foreign fighter. So the walkout for Glover's fight, the crowd was pretty fired up already. ... I will talk about the fight itself next week. That will be my Brazil trip part two.