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Frank Camacho sees his UFC Singapore bout with Beneil Dariush as a potential coming-out party.
Frank Camacho will be exorcising his demons Saturday morning when he meets Beneil Dariush in a lightweight contest on the UFC Singapore main card.
Camacho made his Octagon debut in 2017 in the very same arena in which he’ll be fighting in just a matter of hours, the Singapore Indoor Stadium. “The Crank” faced Li Jingliang in a short-notice welterweight bout, losing to the current contender by unanimous decision.
Camacho said his unsuccessful UFC debut, which earned himself and Jingliang a Fight of the Night bonus, has been on his mind ahead of his second trip to Singapore. He’ll try to avenge his debut loss in the Dariush fight.
“Singapore, there’s a lot of meaning to that country for me,” Camacho told Bloody Elbow. “I made my UFC debut there. The fans are fricking awesome. The country is freaking beautiful. The city of the future. I was there pretty early, and there was no trash, everything is so clean. The airport is fricking phenomenal. I think they just added a waterfall in there. It’s a really special place for me.”
After losing his UFC debut, Camacho returned to his natural weight class of lightweight and picked up a hard-fought victory over Damien Brown. But then, the Guam native went back to 170 pounds, where he lost two straight, including a brutal knockout to Geoff Neal.
Camacho’s fate would be decided in his next bout, a lightweight clash against Nick Hein this past June at UFC Stockholm. It was a do-or-die moment for Camacho if he wanted his dream of fighting in the UFC to live on any longer. Ahead of the Hein fight, Camacho made some major life changes, including a move to southern California to train at Team Oyama.
Camacho not only beat Hein, rebounding from a two-fight skid, but he earned his first stoppage win in the promotion. Late in the second round, Camacho battered Hein with head and body strikes until the referee had seen enough.
“If you look at that fight, at the end of the fight when I got the stoppage, I didn’t go crazy, start yelling, I didn’t jump on top of the cage,” Camacho said. “I put my hands up and I closed my eyes and smiled. What a relief on my shoulders. This is something that I’ve always dreamed of and I’ve always wanted, and we finally got it through adversity and that fight.”
Camacho is the definition of an action fighter. Win or lose, he always puts on entertaining fights. That has always seemed to be his priority.
But now that he’s training at Team Oyama alongside a lot of UFC talent including Alex Perez, Marlon Vera, and Louis Smolka, among others, Camacho’s outlook on fighting has changed. He has evolved. He still wants to put on exciting performances, but he ultimately wants to go on a big run — not alternate wins and losses like he has in the past. He believes he is a more “calculated” fighter than he once was, and compares his growth to that of Justin Gaethje.
“I really love how coach Colin and the team can communicate over to me,” Camacho said. “If you look at the fight with Nick Hein, it’s like, ‘Hey, we’re not brawling.’ Old Frank would’ve been like, I could’ve made that Nick Hein fight super hard.
“The win over Nick was just really more of a stamp, like, ‘Hey, this is what we need to be doing.’”
Camacho has had to make some sacrifices to train in California. Away from his family back home in Guam, Camacho currently lives in Team Oyama’s fighter house, but hopes to soon move his family to California with him. A couple more post-fight bonuses could help, he said, due to the high cost of living in southern California.
“It was actually my wife’s idea,” Camacho said. “She was like, ‘Yo, you’re not fighting until you get out of here and find a good camp.’”
Now focused on Dariush, Camacho looks at the fight in Singapore as an opportunity to break through in the stacked 155-pound division and prove he’s more than just an action fighter. He said he considers this the biggest fight of his career.
“It really comes down to the way I perform,” Camacho said. “Do I just go out there and become a snoozefest, or do I go out there and really try and take him out? Then again, that’s the way I fight, so I’m going to be gunning for it.
“It would be a great way for me to put a stamp on my name in the division, and let everyone know I’m here.”