Former UFC lightweight champion Benson Henderson will look for his second straight victory since losing the title to Anthony Pettis when he faces Rustam Khabilov in the main event of UFC Fight Night 42 on Saturday night.
This is will mark the seventh straight fight for Henderson that is a five round main event fight, while this will be the first main event for Khabilov.
During his appearance on last night’s edition of UFC Tonight on Fox Sports 1, Henderson (20-3) admitted that when he first accepted the fight, he actually thought it was against Khabib Nurmagomedov.
“That sadly, on my part, sadly is a true story,” Henderson said. “It was a tweet, I saw some Russian name and I just assumed it was Khabib because they were having a hard time finding him an opponent. I assumed it was him and come to find out it was Rustam instead but sounds good to me either way, let’s do it.”
Khabilov (17-1) is currently on a six fight winning streak and three of those wins have come in the UFC. His most recent victory came in November at UFC Fight for the Troops 3 as he defeated Jorge Masvidal by unanimous decision.
Since entering the UFC, Khabilov has shown off his grappling abilities and Henderson is very aware of this. Henderson would tell the weekly UFC news program that he knows about the abilities of Khabilov and he will be ready wherever this fight goes.
“He’s a great Sambo guy, a world class wrestler,” Henderson said. “Any time you’ve got two great grapplers going at it, it can end up being a stand-up war. We’re ready for anything, a lot of grappling or a stand up war, just throwing a lot of bombs.”
Henderson revealed earlier this week that he moved his camp for this fight up to Flagstaff from Glendale, Arizona. The reasoning for moving his camp to Flagstaff was for one reason only, which was for the higher elevation in Flagstaff than Glendale.
“A lot of people do not realize that Albuquerque is higher up that Denver is — the elevation point,” Henderson explained. “We went to Flagstaff. We moved my camp. We have five guys from the MMA Lab fighting on this card in Albuquerque. We are a small gym but we are getting better. We are a low key gym. We are very blue collared guys at my gym. We are blowing up now so we ended up just moving the camp up to Flagstaff. The elevation is 7,300 feet or something like that. So we moved the camp up there to get ready for the elevation.”
If Henderson is able to walk out of the cage on Saturday night with a victory it would be his seventh victory in a UFC main event and would put him one step closer to getting an opportunity to regain the UFC lightweight title.