Josh Hokit is very good at making people hate him during fight weeks, but also at making fans on fight night. This is what happened to Alex Pereira, who has previously called Hokit a disrespectful r-ard. After almost seeing The Incredible Hockey take the belt from Ciryl Gane but at UFC 334? Pereira now has a lot of respect for the man.
Gane defeated Hokit by unanimous decision 48-47 (see scorecards here), and Pereira made it clear that he felt the referees got it very wrong.
“Call the police! Call the police!” he said in an Instagram post. “Hi, can you come down to Madison Square Garden? Yes, there’s a robbery going on right now.”
“I thought it was a robbery,” Pereira said backstage after the brawl. “I thought Hokit won the fight for sure. Gane didn’t do anything. I wanted Gane to win, but come on. Not like this. It’s a bit much, right? Unless I’m watching another fight, man. Really? That’s crazy.”
Pereira even sought out Hokit to congratulate him on his performance.
“Brother, he says for him, you won, brother,” Pereira’s interpreter told Hokit. “So he respects.”
Let’s see if that respect survives Hokit’s endless trash talk and what seems an inevitable clash between the two heavyweights. Leading up to UFC 334, Dana White repeatedly said that the fight between Hokit and Pereira would be huge. For now, though, Pereira has to get through his fight with Sergey Pavlovich at UFC 335 first of all.