Brendson Ribeiro won a fight he wasn’t supposed to win Saturday night, then spent his post-fight scrum asking Brazilian officials to help his family find out what happened to his missing brother.
The brother, who Ribeiro said is his brother through their father, disappeared in northern Brazil almost six months ago. Ribeiro said the family assumes he is dead. They have no proof either way, and that is the part eating at them.
“On April 27, in the township that I’m from, the authorities have not said anything. My family has no voice there,” Ribeiro told MMA Junkie and other reporters through an interpreter at UFC Fight Night 290, also billed as UFC Vegas 122.
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He pointed at his own visibility as the reason for speaking up. “As an athlete that has a platform right now I just want to get it out there for someone to help us,” he said, naming the governor, the mayor and local authorities as the people he wants to hear from.
What the family wants is closure, even if that means recovering remains. “We don’t think that he’s alive anymore. We just want to understand,” Ribeiro said. “My dad is suffering. The wife is suffering. The brothers are suffering.”
You could see it on him before he said a word. Ribeiro broke down the second the fight ended inside the Meta APEX, and it had little to do with the losing streak he had just buried.
The fight
The result itself was one of the bigger surprises on the card. Ribeiro (18-11 MMA, 3-6 UFC) submitted Felipe Franco (11-3 MMA, 1-2 UFC) in under two minutes of their light heavyweight bout, ending a four-fight losing skid. Three of those four losses came by first-round finish, so the 30-year-old walked in with most people writing him off.
He noticed. “The biggest mistake people make is to underestimate me and to count me out,” Ribeiro said, adding that he wasn’t accusing Franco of doing that. He went on to call the finish “another guillotine for the belt,” a nod to how often that choke has bailed him out over his career.
For Franco, it’s a second loss in three UFC appearances and the first real dent in a record that came in at 11-2. For Ribeiro, a win at 3-6 in the promotion buys him another booking at a time when the alternative was likely a pink slip. No next opponent was announced.
Quick take
I’ve sat through a thousand post-fight scrums where a guy thanks his coach, his sponsor and his barber. This one was a man using the only microphone he’ll get all year to ask a mayor and a governor to pick up the phone. Ribeiro answered every question straight, including the ugly one about whether his brother is still alive. Whatever you thought of his chances against Franco, his family has been waiting since April 27 for somebody official to say anything at all, and as of Saturday night, by Ribeiro’s account, nobody has.
