Vancouver – Between rounds at UFC Vancouver on Saturday, Aiemann Zahabi and Chito Vera came face to face in one of those rare, ‘only in MMA’ type moments.
Similar to Lawler vs. MacDonald, minus the gnarled split lip and carnage that was Rory MacDonald’s face. Still, a very cool moment, one that Zahabi, a split decision winner after 15 minutes, touched on after the fight.
“I wanted to touch gloves and say, ‘Good job, I’ll see you in the next round.’ Kind of like I did with all my other opponents,” Zahabi (14-2) said backstage at Rogers Arena.
“You know, for me, I don’t have hatred in my heart for my opponents. For me, it’s just business. I consider myself more of an assassin. I don’t have to hate you to want to kill you. I’m going to go out there and I’m going to do my job. I know what my mission is, it’s to go out there and fight and leave everything behind.”
However, Zahabi did get the feeling that Chito Vera was trying to send him a message. “I felt like he wanted to intimidate me with hate, like he was some tough gangster. But you can’t intimidate me, man. I fight in a cage for a living. I fight in the octagon for a living. There’s no intimidation here. I’m here to fight you.”
“I have been preparing for two and a half months to come here and fight you. I don’t need to be intimidated,” he added. “So I wanted to let him know that I’m not a fraud. I’m from Montreal, we’ve seen violence before.”
Georges St-Pierre, a teammate of Zahabi’s at TriStar in Montreal, certainly knows a thing or two about violence. Now in his late 30s, Aiemann is making an impressive, if somewhat surprising, bid to capture the title. The story surrounding that run is one he wants to take control of.
“I don’t like the story being told about me, especially because it’s always about my age. ‘How can I be a prospect at 37?'”
“I’m not saying I’m a prospect. I’m here to work,” he countered. “For me it’s my job. Everyone does something spectacular in sports at some point, they’re just doing a job. It looks spectacular right now because of the years of training – they were able to do something where the probability was very low, but for them they were just doing a job. They were focused on what they were doing.”
Watch the full UFC Vancouver post-fight press conference with Aiemann Zahabi above.
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