Brandon Royval is the backup for Joshua Van vs. Manel Kape at UFC 336. If either man falls out of the flyweight title fight in January, Royval is the guy who gets the phone call.
He confirmed it Wednesday in a conversation with Ariel Helwani, and MMA Junkie and Championship Rounds both ran with it from there. Royval was refreshingly plain about how little he’s actually been told: “They haven’t told me anything specific, just that I’m the backup.”
That’s the job. You cut, you train, you study two guys you may never fight that night, and most of the time you go home with nothing but a fight week tan. Royval seems to have made peace with that and found the angle that helps him.
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“At least it keeps me in the title picture for a little bit, and it gets me studying the champion and the contender for the championship,” he said.
He’s also hoping the promotion reads the assignment the same way he does. “Hopefully it’s in the eyes of the UFC too, like, ‘All right, we’re up next.’” That’s a fighter asking for a title shot without filing a formal complaint about it, which I respect.
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The Van history
Royval and Van have shared the cage before, and Royval clearly hasn’t stopped thinking about it. “I think that the Van fight will always be on the table for me just because how good of a fight it was, and we broke a lot of records or whatever it is,” he said. The “or whatever it is” is doing a lot of work there. Guys who put on that kind of fight tend to stop counting the records and start counting the bonus checks, which tracks with Sports Illustrated tagging him a “UFC Bonus Machine” in its headline on the news.
Van and Kape are booked for a joint UFC 335 and UFC 336 press conference this Friday, sharing the dais with Charles Oliveira, Diego Lopes, Alex Pereira, Sergei Pavlovich, Carlos Prates and Michael Morales. Royval isn’t on that list. He’ll be watching like the rest of us, just with a notepad.
The same Helwani segment had Royval and Alex Hernandez reacting to footage of Usman Nurmagomedov and his team jumping Merab Dvalishvili in an Abu Dhabi hotel lobby ahead of RAF Abu Dhabi. Hernandez went scorched earth on the premeditation. Royval zeroed in on the guy standing next to Dvalishvili: “You know what’s the coolest thing out of all that? The dude that he was with held it down, bro. It was like 10 on 2.”
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My take: this is the right guy in the right chair. Flyweight title fights are 125 pounds of variables, and a backup who already went the distance in a classic with one of the headliners is about as live an insurance policy as the UFC can buy. Royval answered every question straight and didn’t pretend the gig was more than it is. Friday, Van and Kape sit behind the microphones. Somewhere, Royval is taking notes on both of them.
