Alex Pereira wants a film study, and he wants Valter Walker as the subject.
The former two-division UFC champion went after Walker in an Instagram comment this week, calling the heavyweight a fraud and asking whether anyone would make a video that picks apart his record. BJPenn.com first reported the exchange.
“Anyone want to make a video analyzing Valter’s record and explaining why he’s a fraud?” Pereira wrote.
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He kept going. Pereira said Walker had good results before he got to the UFC, then argued that fans should look past the numbers and examine who Walker actually fought, the level of that competition, and who he has beaten and lost to since arriving in the Octagon.
“If he gets a good fighter, he’s screwed!” Pereira wrote.
Then he pointed at himself. “You can look at my record and compare it too,” he added. “And remember that I didn’t do much in MMA before entering the UFC. What helped me was all the experience I gained in kickboxing.”
That is a fair point coming from a man who showed up with a thin MMA résumé and left with belts in two divisions.
How We Got Here
The two Brazilians have been sniping at each other on social media for weeks. At one point Pereira publicly challenged Walker, the older brother of veteran Johnny Walker, to a sparring match for money. Nobody has taken him up on it yet.
What lit the latest fuse was Walker’s podcast. On a recent episode, Walker predicted that Sergei Pavlovich will knock Pereira out in the first round of their upcoming fight. He also said Pereira is nursing a bruised ego, took a shot below the belt about his anatomy, and accused him of caring mostly about money. The clip went viral, and Pereira answered fast.
The timing matters. Pereira makes his UFC heavyweight return against Pavlovich at UFC 335 later this year, a five-round fight. Walker is predicting a Round 1 finish for a Russian with a reputation for heavy hands, and he’s doing it about a man who has built a career on putting people to sleep.
Walker is unbooked. His last appearance came at UFC 329, a first-round submission against former LFA champ Thomas Petersen. He’s known as a grappler, which makes his knockout prediction for somebody else’s fight a little rich.
The heavyweight division is moving around them, too. Tom Aspinall vacated the title, Ciryl Gane was promoted to undisputed champion, and Dana White recently waved off a Pereira theory about the UFC 334 main event booking by saying, “These guys are the most paranoid people on the planet.”
The Take
I’ll take this kind of beef over a cryptic emoji any day. Pereira answered a question nobody asked him, and he answered it straight with names, standards and his own record on the table for comparison. Walker talks a good game on a microphone, but the guy calling him a fraud is the one with a date. If Pereira gets through Pavlovich at UFC 335, Walker will have talked himself into the hardest booking in the division, and a matchmaker with any sense of humor will hand it to him.
