Valter Walker has a forecast for Alex Pereira, and it ends with the former two-division champion back at a tire shop.
The 16-1 heavyweight went after Pereira again in an interview with Sexto Round and made their back-and-forth uglier. He opened on Pereira’s spending habits. “Everything for him is buying luxury cars,” Walker said, then went after one recent purchase: “Did you see that last luxury car he bought that he doesn’t even fit in?” From there he made a crude anatomical leap that you can find in the original interview if you really need it.
Walker also denied he’d crossed any line. “How did I disrespect him? I just have my opinion,” he said, before repeating the prediction that started all this: Sergei Pavlovich knocks Pereira out in the first round. “He has a very bruised ego,” Walker added. His plan after that is to fight Pereira himself and “take his foot,” which, given how Walker wins, reads less like a figure of speech and more like a game plan. He wrapped it by saying people can expect Pereira back at the tire shop. “Unfortunately, that is the future waiting for him.”
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How this started
Pereira’s bid for a title in a third weight class went sideways in June, when Ciryl Gane knocked him out on the White House lawn. He’s staying at heavyweight anyway. He gets Pavlovich at UFC 335 in Las Vegas in December, on the card headlined by Charles Oliveira defending the BMF title against Diego Lopes.
Rather than spend his energy on Pavlovich, Pereira turned on Walker after his countryman picked the Russian, Bloody Elbow reported. Pereira offered Walker a sparring match with his entire purse on the line. Fans called out the money angle pretty quickly, and Walker obviously noticed, because the luxury car material is aimed right at it.
Walker’s recent work gives him some room to talk. He’s won five straight, the first four by heel hook, and in July at UFC Abu Dhabi he changed the recipe slightly and made Thomas Petersen tap to a calf slicer. That’s five consecutive heavyweights who left the cage with sore legs, the kind of specialty that makes teammates find a reason to skip open mat.
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Quick take
Pereira opened this door. Offering a heavyweight prospect a sparring match for your purse sounds tough until you realize it hands a 16-1 leg-lock specialist a month of free headlines, and Walker has used every minute of it. The trash talk is gross in spots and lazy in others, but the fight underneath it is legit: Pereira against a guy who catches feet for a living. None of it matters if Pavlovich does what Walker says he will in December. If Pereira gets through the Russian, Walker should stop calling Sexto Round and start calling the matchmakers.
