Plenty of fighters will say the biggest win of their respective careers is the most recent one.
After Sergio Pettis prevented Bellator all-timer Patricio “Pitbull” Freire from capturing a championship in a record third weight class, that has the look of a win that would be tough to beat.
But there was little rest for Pettis, who already knew what was next for him after a convincing decision victory in June: a bantamweight title unification with his belt on the line against interim champ and grand prix winner Patchy Mix.
With no one else on deck — and the future of his promoter up in the air — five months of thinking only of Mix culminates in Friday night’s co-main event clash at Bellator 301 in Chicago.
“I was just having a conversation with another athlete recently about [how] it’s kind of weird how we’re thinking about these guys all day long, for X amount of time,” Pettis told The Post in a recent Zoom interview. “… It’s been five months. As soon as I beat Patricio, I had to face off with Patchy Mix, and I already felt the adrenaline, the emotions, the thoughts, and everything that’s gonna come [on] Nov. 17. It’s a crazy job.”
Pettis (23-5, eight finishes) pointed out he did take “a little breather” of a vacation after the Pitbull fight, but has otherwise been dialed in to the latest underdog assignment ahead of him.
Against Mix (18-1, 14 finishes), the betting line on Pettis to win has risen to the +200 range, longer odds than what closed against Pitbull, Kyoji Horiguchi or Juan Archuleta, the latter of whom Pettis defeated to win the Bellator 135-pound crown two years ago.
As he told The Post before upsetting Pitbull, Pettis loves to play the spoiler.
“I like being the underdog,” he reiterated. “I’m only 5-foot-5, so of course, everybody’s gonna overlook me. It makes sense. But when I go in there and I compete, I turn into a different animal. I feel, people, they start to see what I really have and what I’m capable of doing. I’ve been overlooked my whole life, and I’m OK with it, man; I like it, actually. [It] puts a chip on my shoulder.”
Though Mix is not a past opponent, Pettis is quite familiar with the foe who knocked out friend Raufeon Stots to win the Bellator World Bantamweight Grand Prix in April, landing a devastating knee to end the tournament final in just 80 seconds.
More notorious for his potent grappling chops — Mix has 12 wins via submission including three during his current five-fight hot streak — the knockout of Stots gave the interim champ’s skill set some extra dimension.
“I think it caught everybody by surprise. I even think it caught him by surprise,” suggests Pettis. “It was like, Oh! I landed this excellent knee and finished the fight, made a million dollars, what a fairy tale story.”
Pettis expressed respect for Mix, as a fight and a person, but the knockout win doesn’t change the fact that Pettis, a lifelong practitioner of Taekwondo, won’t be making much of a secret of how he ideally would like to do Saturday at Wintrust Arena.
“I like to keep the fight standing,” Pettis says. “I’m a very defensive wrestler, defensive jiu-jitsu. I have some tricks up my sleeve. I do have offensive jiu-jitsu as well. But my bread and butter is keeping it on the feet.”
The personal stakes for this one are as high as it gets for Pettis, but Bellator’s uncertain future does hang over the entire event.
Chatter of Bellator being up for sale has persisted throughout the year, with reports of PFL as the ultimate buyer cropping up as early as April and looking increasingly like an unofficial certainty in recent weeks.
Bellator 301 is the last announced event from Bellator figures to be the promotion’s swan song on Showtime, which is bowing out of combat sports after nearly four decades.
That isn’t to say this will be Bellator’s final event, but there’s no way to know what’s to come for the unified Bellator bantamweight champion after the dust settles this weekend until a sale is made official.
For his part, Pettis won’t concern himself with a macro-level change over which he has no control.
The whole situation reminds Pettis of his time competing at 125 pounds in the UFC, back during a time when there was concern the flyweight division would be abandoned by the top MMA promotion.
“They were talking about getting rid of the division, and around that time, I was fighting Jussier Formiga, and I was very close to a title shot,” Pettis recalls. “I was like, ‘Damn, all this hard work for no reason. They’re about to get rid of the division.’ And I went into that fight, and I lost that fight.
“Mentally, I’m not gonna make that mistake this time. I’m not really sure what’s going on with Bellator, any of that. At this point, I really don’t care. I know I’m their champion, and I plan on being the champion until it’s all said and done.”