It’s not that Alex Pereira is trying to make Madison Square Garden his unofficial home arena; it just kind of works out that way each November.
First, there was the UFC debut two years ago — the fifth pro MMA fight for the former two-division champion kickboxer — which began with the curiosity of a man who’d twice beaten then-middleweight champion Israel Adesanya in that other sport and ended with a thrilling flying knee TKO of Andreas Michailidis.
A year later, Pereira capped his rapid rise in his new sport to another matchup with Adesanya with a fifth-round, comeback TKO to claim his first UFC title.
And while Adesanya reclaimed his crown — and subsequently lost it again — by finally defeating his career rival via knockout in April, Pereira already finds himself fighting once again at the Garden for UFC gold, this time at light heavyweight in the UFC 295 main event.
Pereira, set to become the UFC’s first fighter to headline at the Garden twice, will face Jiri Prochazka on Saturday (10 p.m. ET, ESPN+ pay-per-view) in the UFC’s third fight for a vacant 205-pound title in just 11 months — a mess created by former champion Prochazka relinquishing his title after a shoulder injury last fall.
“I’m fighting the real champ,” Pereira, a Brazilian who fights out of Bethel, Conn., recently told The Post through an interpreter. “I’m fighting the original guy, and that is exciting. We’re gonna do a great fight.”
As turbulent as the past year has been for the weight class, the upcoming matchup has a look of legitimacy.
Prochazka had defeated Pereira’s coach Glover Teixeira to win the championship in June 2022 in a wild barn burner that ended with the Czechia native submitting incumbent champ Teixeira in a fight he would have lost on the scorecards.
When he fell out of a planned rematch with Teixeira, the UFC slapped together a new matchup for the title between ex-champ Jan Blachowicz and Madomed Ankalaev, bypassing Teixeira who preferred not to fight on the UFC’s planned December date.
That fight ended in a draw, leaving an empty throne at light heavyweight, and within the hour a new matchup was set up for January in Brazil between Teixeira and Jamahal Hill.
Hill battered local favorite Teixeira, a native of Brazil and naturalized U.S. citizen who’s called Connecticut home for decades, to win the crown and send Pereira’s coach into retirement at age 43.
The plan ostensibly was to pit Hill against Prochazka upon his return late in 2023, but Hill ruptured an Achilles tendon playing basketball in July and would also step aside as Prochazka did.
That opened the door for Pereira, with whom Adesanya was uninterested in meeting in an MMA rubber match and planned to go up 20 points from middleweight.
Pereira, in his MMA debut at 205 pounds, picked up a hard-fought decision over Blachowicz in July in a billed No. 1 contender matchup.
“[My body] responded very well,” Pereira said of competing at light heavyweight. “You gotta put the circumstance [in context]. I was coming back from a knockout loss, fighting in a new weight class, and fighting at the high altitude [in Salt Lake City]. So, putting it all together, I actually think I had a very, very good response for the weight class.”
Pereira was a mammoth of a middleweight, and his 6-foot-4 frame is filled out enough to fit in just fine in the heavier division when he defeated Blachowicz
By his own estimate, Pereira weighed about 227 pounds — at the higher end for rehydrated light heavyweights — when he walked to the cage a day after weighing in at 205 ¹/₂ .
“If this was at the lower weight class, if it was at middleweight, I would have deprived myself of some food and eating less, already cutting weight,” Pereira says. “Now, I’ve actually been able to eat a little more. So it’s much better.”
With a over Prochazka, Pereira would become the eighth man to claim UFC titles in multiple weight classes, a feat original UFC 295 headliner Jon Jones — before an injury forced him out — accomplished earlier this year.
While it took Jones 15 years from his promotional debut to win the belts, Pereira is on the cusp of blowing the previous-fastest run out of the water.
When Conor McGregor knocked out lightweight Eddie Alvarez seven years ago at the first UFC event at the Garden to become the first simultaneous “champ-champ”, he was about 3 ½ years (1,316 days) removed from his debut.
Saturday will mark two years and five days (735 days) since that sensational debut at The World’s Most Famous Arena.
“Not that fast,” said Pereira when asked whether he expected to get to this point so quickly when he crossed over permanently from kickboxing. “I switched weight classes. I expected to be fighting. But no, everything happened fast.”