The former welterweight champion defended his pastaweight title last week at a restaurant in Las Vegas. In his own words, here’s how it all went down.
Add another accolade to Matt Serra’s resume. The first and only UFC pastaweight champion defended his title for the first time last week, right before getting inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame. It wasn’t much of a fight, with the former welterweight title holder mounting his severely intoxicated opponent until security stepped in.
Serra posted a video of the altercation and another of the lead up to it, on his Instagram page. And, in a recent episode of UFC Unfiltered (which Serra co-hosts with comedian Jim Norton), he gave a more detailed explanation of just what went down (transcript via MMA Fighting).
“I was almost out of there! I was almost in the clear,” Serra said, noting that the man and woman with him entered the restaurant extremely inebriated before the man began cursing, and throwing things at staff. “My waiter is bringing me the check and then he gets up and he goes after my waiter – just a drunk moron and he has his fists clenched. He was throwing sh-t at the other waiter, now he’s facing me and my family. So he’s drunk and something’s gonna happen. This guy is hitting him or he’s gonna throw something and my family is behind me. So I stood up and then he directed everything towards me the second I stood up. ‘You! I’ll fight you!’
“So he took his shirt off and the second he took his shirt off, I don’t know if he went to swing but I just neutralized that sh-t. I stepped right in, got him around his waist – my wife, she goes, ‘When you went in I thought that you were gonna slam him. You let him down so gently!’ Dude, he just, like, melted when I grabbed him. He folded to jelly. so I got him around the waist, basic takedown. I gave him a free jiu-jitsu lesson.”
Despite having the crowd firmly behind him, Serra made it clear that he had to stay realistic about using force against someone so clearly drunk… even if the man ‘deserves to get smacked.’
“I took him down, I got a bigger applause than I did in my first GSP fight,” Serra laughed. “The audience erupted. They were still clapping by the time my sister started filming because that dude was as obnoxious as you can get. Yelling, screaming, making a scene, being vulgar. Total f-cking d-ckhead.
“Even though he deserves to get smacked or something, the loser goes to the hospital and the winner goes to jail. I know there was no winning in beating up this guy but he definitely needed to be subdued because he was gonna hit somebody.”
No word yet on when Serra plans to defend his belt again. But, if he hangs around the Vegas strip long enough, he’s sure to find plenty of contenders.