Johnny Walker will not fight Valter Walker. Not for a ranking, not for a payday, not ever.
The half-brothers are both ranked UFC heavyweights now, which means somebody was always going to ask. Johnny got the question from MMA Fighting this week and answered it like a man who’d been asked whether he wanted to set his own car on fire. “No, man. Am I going to fight my own brother? Are you crazy?” he said.
His reasoning was blunt and a little dark. Walker described fighting as a primitive business where you can’t afford to think about whether the guy across from you has a mother or kids, because sympathy gets you hurt. “I go in there to hurt other people. I don’t want to hurt my own blood, you know?” he said. Doing that to a brother, he added, is off the table. “Unless the guy is completely crazy,” Walker said, before finishing the thought: “I’m not that crazy.”
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Yahoo Sports, running a piece from Heavy, pointed out that the UFC has never booked a sibling against sibling. That streak looks safe.
Brotherly love, with a hotel bill
The more interesting part of the interview came after the fight question. Johnny and Valter have trained together in Russia, but Johnny was candid that their relationship has rough patches, mostly because of Valter’s online antics. He said Valter jokes around too much, is often disrespectful, and has upset his mother, his wife and even Valter’s own fans.
“He’s an idiot. There’s nothing I can do about it. I accept him the way he is, and I love him the way he is,” Johnny said.
He chalked some of it up to age. Valter is 28, and Johnny figures he’ll mature by 30. In the meantime, Johnny is happy to have him in camp in Las Vegas. Just not under his roof. “He just can’t stay at my house. My wife won’t let him in,” he said, laughing.
The actual fight this week
Johnny has bigger problems than family dinner. He headlines UFC Vegas 124 this Saturday, Nov. 7, in Las Vegas against Waldo Cortes-Acosta, and he took the fight on short notice. According to Heavy, the UFC went to several other heavyweights first, Vitor Petrino among them, before landing on Walker.
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It’s only his second fight at heavyweight. His debut at UFC 332 in October ended with a flying knee that knocked out Mick Parkin, and a win over Cortes-Acosta could push him further up the division. Heavy floated the idea that a knockout could fast-track him toward a title shot.
Valter, meanwhile, is doing his own damage. He’s on a five-fight win streak, and all five wins came by first-round submission. If both brothers keep winning, the rankings are going to keep stacking them closer together, and the question will keep coming back every fight week.
Good. Let it come back. Johnny already gave the only answer that matters, and he gave it straight, which is more than most fighters manage when a reporter dangles a money fight in front of them. The matchmaker who wants chaos at heavyweight can book Johnny against whoever’s left standing in the top 15. Saturday he gets Cortes-Acosta on short notice, a guy who said yes when others didn’t, and that’s the Walker fight worth caring about right now.
