No. 3-ranked middleweight contender, Khamzat Chimaev, remains undefeated in his mixed martial arts (MMA) career, compiling a perfect 14-0 record with 12 finishes. That includes his first-round submission victory over Robert Whittaker at UFC 308 last fall in Abu Dhabi.
Don’t expect Dricus Du Plessis to be intimidated.
That’s because the reigning middleweight titleholder believes Chimaev will be unable to keep pace when their eventual title fight drags on into the championship rounds, based on difficulties “Borz” had against UFC veterans Gilbert Burns and Kamaru Usman.
‘’The way he goes for it in the first round, he’s really hard to deal with in the beginning of the fight, but so am I,” Du Plessis told Ariel Helwani on Tuesday. “When you go that hard and round two, three, four, five comes, you still have to be there and I’ve proven that I am there in those rounds. If he wants to come out, I’m still gonna be there, like I was there in the first, ready to kill, and that will never change in my game.”
Du Plessis (23-2) is 9-0 under the UFC banner and coming off his UFC 312 title defense against former champion Sean Strickland. Defeating Chimaev could put him one or two fights away from cleaning out the 185-pound weight class, leading to a potential jump to the light heavyweight division.
“If you look at a guy like Kamaru Usman, what he did with Khamzat on 10-days notice, you look at Gilbert Burns, those guys don’t get intimidated by people screaming, ‘I smesh, I smesh,’ on the microphone after missing weight — that is not how it works,” Du Plessis continued. “People think of Khamzat as this boogeyman. I don’t. I don’t see that. For me, I only see one thing. That’s the potential to do good to my legacy. The potential to make my legacy even better.”
UFC is expected to book Du Plessis vs. Chimaev for later this year.