Now that he has momentum back on his side, Robert
Whittaker would like to keep it going for the rest of the
year.
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The former middleweight champion returned to the win column in the
UFC 298 co-main event, outdueling Paulo Costa
over three rounds for a unanimous decision triumph on Saturday at
the Honda Center in Anaheim, California. Victory didn’t come
easily, as Whittaker was wobbled by a spinning head kick from Costa
in the late stages of Round 1. Still, “The Reaper” was able to
recover and outland his opponent over the bout’s final 10
minutes.
“Obviously I’m very happy with it,” Whittaker said at the
post-fight press conference. “I always look like this after fights.
Plus I had a firefight with Costa, it shows a little bit. More than
the win itself, I’m satisfied with what I wanted to achieve and I
achieved that.”
As for the kick that nearly changed the course of the fight,
Whittaker didn’t let it alter his focus.
“I just brushed it off,” he said. “We’re in the fight game. There
are moments, there are milliseconds that can change the outcome of
the fight. You can’t let off for a second. Sometimes you do
everything right and [they] throw a Hail Mary spinning capoeira
kick and it’ll land. But I did brush it off.”
Whittaker entered UFC 298 on the heels of a second-round TKO loss
to current 185-pound champion Dricus Du
Plessis last July. It was his first loss to an opponent not
named Israel
Adesanya since 2014, and it changed the pecking order in the
middleweight division.
“Options are definitely open,” Whittaker said. “The middleweight
division is funny. There’s so much movement and fluidity and
opportunity in it that any fight could be made at any time,
anywhere. Honsetly, the UFC have always done right by me. I’ve
never had to pick my opponents. They’ve always been laid out in
front of me. I”m not about to change the way I conduct
business.”
While Whittaker doesn’t necessarily have an opponent in mind, he
does have an ideal level of activity he’d like to maintain
throughout the rest of the year.
“I’d definitely like to fight twice more,” he said. “To be able to
jump in again mid-year would be great for me. I want to keep
fighting. I don’t want to take the foot off the pedal. I very much
intend to spend go home to my family and spend some time with my
new daughter, my kids and my wife. But if I’m not spending time
with them, what am I doing? I’m training. That’s all I’m doing. If
I’m training and I’m ready, I’m fighting.”