A hotel in Saskatchewan can be a lonely place when you’ve got a fight coming up to two days, a hungry stomach and a lot to reflect on. That was the situation for Frankie Perez this past Friday, the day before the weigh-ins for his UFC Fight Night 74 fight with Sam Stout. He grew introspective.
Two days later, after scoring an emphatic TKO over Stout in just 54 seconds on the prelims, the 26-year-old Perez promptly — and somewhat shockingly — retired on the spot.
“Honestly I didn’t think that [Sunday] would 100 percent be the day,” he told MMA Fighting on Monday morning. “When I was sitting there the day before weigh-ins, and I’m sitting there by myself, and I was going over and thinking a lot of things man. I was like, you know what, this is it. I called my mom up first off to let her know, then I called every one of my siblings one by one so that they wouldn’t hear it from anybody else, they’d hear it from me. I didn’t tell my dad until I won. I didn’t want any distractions.
“And that was it. I didn’t talk about it, or talk about it. I was just focused on Sam and getting the W.”
After Perez downed Stout, the clamoring on social media was for Stout to retire after suffering his third straight knockout loss. Through Stout’s first 30 professional MMA bouts, he’d never been finished that way, so the writing was beginning to appear on the wall.
Yet it was Perez who made the hard decision right after getting his arm raised.
“I didn’t plan for everything the way it turned out to be,” Perez said of the knockout. “Everything was kind of perfect. And Stout, everybody keeps saying he should hang them up, hang them up, and yeah, maybe he should –but man, the times he’s gotten knocked out, they were nice shots. It wasn’t like he got tapped on top of the head and he fell. KJ Noons is a big knockout artist, and caught him with a big right hand. He fought Ross Pearson who’s got a big left hook. He took a couple of big shots, and I just caught him with another one. If he does, he’s been in this sport 10 years, he knows what he’s doing.
“But, I mean, I guess it was kind of like a storybook ending for me the way things played out.”
Storybook, too, because Perez not only got his first UFC victory in his swan song, but he also collected a Performance of the Night bonus of $50,000. It played out as severance money, which Perez said caught him completely by surprise.
“It’s kind of crazy, because I didn’t even know I got the bonus until I got to my hotel and I called my mom just to see how she was doing,” he said. ?And she said, ‘congratulations, you got it.’ I was like, ‘got what?’ She said, ‘they just announced it, you got the bonus!’ I started jumping up and down. I had no idea. So it was pretty funny. Nobody thought they were going to give it to me because I retired. It was crazy the way it played out.”
Asked if the bonus money might change his tune a little bit, or give him second thoughts about walking away, Perez said it wouldn’t.
“Not at all man, I never got into this sport for the money,” he said. “I never thought about all the money I could be making. It’s nice we can be paid, but I’ve always had my side businesses to make my money and keep me supported financially.”
The New Jersey native Perez began training at 17 years old, and he has been competing since he was 18. For the last eight years he said he’s been forced to watch things outside the cage stream by in his periphery as he dedicated himself to training.
Though he had a great moment in Saskatoon at the end of his journey, it was the moments he missed en-route that bothered him.
“I talked to one of my buddies right before I got the [Stout] fight, and I was going over all the things going on,” he said. “When I fought Johnny Case [in my UFC debut], I was going through a lot of personal issues. I lost my grandfather right before the fight, and my grandmother right after. With training for that fight, I couldn’t be around them all the time, and that put things into perspective as far as what else am I going to be missing in my life. I’ve been dedicating my life to this sport. I kind of just been thinking about it, and it just felt like the moment. Everything came into play, and I just knew it was the right time for me.”
It’s rare for anybody to get out of the fight game gracefully, but it helps to have a Plan B. In Perez’s case, he said he’ll continue to help his teammates Corey Anderson, Frankie Edgar and Edson Barboza, but that he has other pokers in the fire.
“I’ve had a DJ company since I was 18,” he said. “I do private parties, like weddings and Sweet 16s and stuff like that. So I’ve been very busy doing that. And I’m in the family business. My family owns a clothing line called Dead Serious Fight Gear, and plus they have their own promotion, so I’m always helping them as far as production wise and stuff like that. I mean right now that’s what I got. Who knows, if the UFC needs somebody to travel with them, I’m always down to work and travel.
“But right now I really just want to take this time to enjoy my family, go see my family in Florida and travel a little bit and enjoy fatty foods.”