Welterweight Chris Curtis made a decision to move his training away from the midwest to Team Quest in California and the move paid off earlier this month as he became the CES MMA welterweight champion with a stoppage victory against Gil de Freitas at CES MMA 32.
Curtis (12-4) landed a strike that rocked Freitas and initially he took a step back to reset. Once Curtis saw the he hurt his opponent, he went for the finish and referee Kevin MacDonald stopped the fight at the 3:13 mark of the opening round.
Nearly two weeks have passed since that fight took place and when recalling the fight on a recent edition of “The MMA Report,” Curtis talked about how he was happy with his performance and everything went exactly the way he thought it would.
“I have watched it probably a hundred times now. I am really happy with everything that happened,” Curtis explained. “This is not a fluke, this is what we worked on. The angles and the countering. We spent ten weeks working on and everything went off perfectly. For me, my coaches, and my teammates — this is what we had been planning for and knew what was going to happen. Everything worked and it was great.”
When a fighter does an interview before a fight, a popular question that will come up is visualization. Some fighters may only envision a certain way of the fight finishing and some see multiple ways just based on what may play out in the fight. For Curtis, the way the fight went down is the exact way he visualized it during his training camp.
“It’s funny man because ideally that is pretty much what we all thought it would be like,” he said. “The game plan was to hit him in the body over and over. Just take the gas out of him. Everybody that knows me and trains with me knows that I am a body shot person. I drop pretty much everybody with that hook to the body. To win like that was perfect for us because it was kind of like icing on the cake. That is what I am known for and to win like that, a title like that in the first round against a tough guy was just a great moment.”
With this fight in the books and winning a title on AXS TV, could a call from the UFC be coming? Curtis would love for that call to come, but he is not going to sit on the sidelines and wait for that call. He will be taking a boxing fight next Friday night and if the call from the UFC does not come, he plans to defend the CES MMA welterweight title later this year.
“I have a boxing match on January 29 so we are getting ready for that right now. As far as MMA goes, we are just figuring out who comes next. It’s up to CES. It would be nice to get that UFC call. There are two UFC cards coming up so we are staying in shape and hoping I get get a backup call maybe. Outside of that, CES is talking about maybe defending in I think April. I am definitely not going to sit back and rest. I am just going to stay in shape, stay active and hopefully something big comes up.”