The ninth season of Bellator MMA will continue on Friday night from the Moda Center in Portland, Oregon. One fighter to keep an eye out for on the preliminary card is Oregon’s own Brent Primus.
His introduction to the sport came in 2005 when his friends told him that he should been training in jiu-jitsu. He ended up falling in love with the sport and began taking amateur mixed martial arts fights.
After a successful amateur career, Primus turned professional in 2010 and has opened his career with back to back rear-naked choke submission wins in the first round. In fact, he has spent less than three minutes in the cage so far.
While he does have a black belt in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, he did not start piling up submission victories until turning pro as most of his amateur victories came by knockout or technical knockout.
“My only submissions came when I turned pro,” Primus said. “I think I had actually had one submission as an amateur but my first five wins as an amateur were all knockouts and TKO’s in less than a minute. Then I started to get into jiu-jitsu a lot more and started to get the technique down and doing the martial art. Then I started taking people down and working on my jiu-jitsu.”
Primus trains out of the Sports Lab which is just a couple of miles away from where he will be fighting on Friday night. His main training partners at the gym include season seven lightweight tournament winner Dave Jansen and MMA veterans Mike Pierce and Pat Healy. He learns new traits from them on a daily basis and one of the main traits he has picked up from all of them is their confidence.
“I look up to those guys a lot and mainly just how they act and how they have the confidence in themselves. I really look up to them how they act in the gym and how they act going into their fights. I definitely look up to that and it has definitely helped me out with my confidence. Just being around them and being in the same atmosphere with them has definitely helped out my confidence level.”
His fight on Friday night will be against Scott Thometz, who has won four of his six fights by submission. Primus plans to score a knockout victory but figures Thometz will look to take the fight to the ground once he feels Primus’s power.
“I am one hundred percent confident on my feet right now and on the ground. I am definitely going to stand up and bang and knock him out. If it goes to the ground, I will be just as happy because I know in my heart and I believe in my techniques that there is no way I am going to get submitted and I feel really great in my jiu-jitsu. I know that he is a really good wrestler so I feel once we stand up and I catch him with a really good punch, I think his wrestling is going to kick in and he is automatically going to shoot on me. I am going to try to stand and knock him out.”
The fight between Primus and Thometz will be one of six fights on the preliminary card on Friday. Other fights on the preliminary card on Friday night will include the return of season seven lightweight tournament finalist Marcin Held as he meets Ryan Healy and MMA veteran Nathan Coy will make his debut with Bellator and look for his fifth straight victory as he will meet Andy Uhrich.