Israel Adesanya discusses ‘fate’ meeting with Alex Pereira at the airport following UFC 287

UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya believes it was a fated meeting with Alex Pereira.

At UFC 287 in April, the two middleweights faced off for gold. The bout was yet another chapter in the long rivalry between ‘The Last Stylebender’ and the Brazilian. The previous November, ‘Poatan’ ended Adesanya’s historic title run with a fifth-round knockout win.

However, the former champion got his revenge in Miami earlier this year. In the second round, Adesanya scored a hellacious knockout win to reclaim the middleweight title. In the process, he ended his rivalry with the Brazilian for the time being. Following the loss, Pereira announced his intention to move to light-heavyweight.

Suddenly, weeks later, Israel Adesanya and Alex Pereira were seen meeting at an airport in Australia. Despite the fact that they had a heated rivalry and have fought each other several times, they were quite nice to one another. As Adesanya explained on the Impaulsive podcast, it was a meeting entirely up to chance.

The middleweight champion explained that he had heard that his former opponent was in town. However, he didn’t expect to see him at the airport, and whenever they met, Pereira was his standardly stoic self.

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“Yeah bro, my life is a video game man,” Israel Adesanya stated when asked about his airport meeting with Alex Pereira. “…So, this is real-life Sims. I do the same thing in life, and I try to play this like a video game. This motherf*cker follows me to MMA, beats me at MSG, and I finally get my revenge on him, he comes to Australia. He meant to come to the boxing fight but apparently he heard I was coming and wasn’t going to show up like, I didn’t care.”

He continued, “Then, by fate, [or] by f*cking God playing The Sims, like ‘let me put these two guys in the aiport together, see what happens’. We’re there at the same time and my manager is like ‘That’s Pereira!’ I was like, ‘No way’… I was on his tale for a while, a good three or four minutes. So I had the shot! Jokes, jokes!”

“…His girl saw me and started laughing, he turned around, stone cold. No laugh, I’m like ‘What’s up man?’, and I shook his hand, he was like ‘Hm’. That’s who he is.”

What do you make of these comments from Israel Adesanya? Are you excited for his next fight?