Sporting a busted left eye after spending four minutes in the ring with Mike Perry, Eddie Alvarez came to a realization about bareknuckle boxing as a sport.
“This is not for the athletes,” Alvarez said during the BKFC 56 post-event news conference. “You can get away with being an athlete in MMA. You can get away with being an athlete in boxing. You need to be a fighter to be in bareknuckle.”
It’s understandable why Alvarez, a former UFC and Bellator champion, would reach that conclusion. He threw everything he had at Perry in their BKFC 56 headliner on Saturday night, but it wasn’t enough as Perry ate Alvarez’s best shots and, in turn, delivered plenty of his own.
The result? Alvarez’s corner stopped the fight because he was losing his vision out of his injured eye, giving Perry a second-round TKO win to claim the “King of Violence” title.
Alvarez isn’t exactly sure which punch did the damage that sealed his fate. He just knows he couldn’t continue without being able to see completely.
“I’m not a hundred percent sure when he landed the shot that he landed, but I remember maybe midway through the second, I felt my eye shutting and closing up on me,” Alvarez said. “Then when I sat down, I went to open my mouth a little bit, and I think my orbital is smashed up. I can’t see. With a guy like Mike, I think I was doing well when I was moving, but then I started getting into a firefight with him, and that’s not something you do with Mike Perry. It was foolish.”
That said, Alvarez wasn’t entirely disappointed with his performance.
“Tonight I dared to be great,” Alvarez said. “I went up a weight class with Mike. I did, I really dared to be great. And I thought, with everything in me, I could beat a bigger guy given my skill set, given his style. I’m not going back on anything. I thought I could beat Mike Perry tonight, bigger or not. And I didn’t. I came up short. …
“With a bare fist, I thought for sure Mike would go down. He didn’t. My hat’s off to Mike Perry. The guy’s a f*cking battle axe. He can take a shot. He can keep plodding forward and give them. He reminds me of myself a lot. I was fighting a little mirror of myself in there tonight, and Mike was the better man.”
Now 1-1 in two BKFC appearances this year, Alvarez isn’t sure what comes next but said he plans on continuing with BKFC.
For more on the card, visit MMA Junkie’s event hub for BKFC 56.
