Now that he has momentum back on his side, Robert Whittaker would like to keep it going for the rest of the year.
The former middleweight champion returned to the win column in the UFC 298 co-main event, outdueling Paulo Costa over three rounds for a unanimous decision triumph on Saturday at the Honda Center in Anaheim, California. Victory didn’t come easily, as Whittaker was wobbled by a spinning head kick from Costa in the late stages of Round 1. Still, “The Reaper” was able to recover and outland his opponent over the bout’s final 10 minutes.
“Obviously I’m very happy with it,” Whittaker said at the post-fight press conference. “I always look like this after fights. Plus I had a firefight with Costa, it shows a little bit. More than the win itself, I’m satisfied with what I wanted to achieve and I achieved that.”
As for the kick that nearly changed the course of the fight, Whittaker didn’t let it alter his focus.
“I just brushed it off,” he said. “We’re in the fight game. There are moments, there are milliseconds that can change the outcome of the fight. You can’t let off for a second. Sometimes you do everything right and [they] throw a Hail Mary spinning capoeira kick and it’ll land. But I did brush it off.”
Whittaker entered UFC 298 on the heels of a second-round TKO loss to current 185-pound champion Dricus Du Plessis last July. It was his first loss to an opponent not named Israel Adesanya since 2014, and it changed the pecking order in the middleweight division.
“Options are definitely open,” Whittaker said. “The middleweight division is funny. There’s so much movement and fluidity and opportunity in it that any fight could be made at any time, anywhere. Honsetly, the UFC have always done right by me. I’ve never had to pick my opponents. They’ve always been laid out in front of me. I”m not about to change the way I conduct business.”
While Whittaker doesn’t necessarily have an opponent in mind, he does have an ideal level of activity he’d like to maintain throughout the rest of the year.
“I’d definitely like to fight twice more,” he said. “To be able to jump in again mid-year would be great for me. I want to keep fighting. I don’t want to take the foot off the pedal. I very much intend to spend go home to my family and spend some time with my new daughter, my kids and my wife. But if I’m not spending time with them, what am I doing? I’m training. That’s all I’m doing. If I’m training and I’m ready, I’m fighting.”
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