UFC Vegas 78: Vicente Luque hopes to put it all together in 'perfect' matchup vs. Rafael dos Anjos
It's easy for a professional athlete to do a reassessment of one's career after a bad game, a fight season, a shocking loss or something of that ilk. It's quite another thing to do that while winning.
And while Vicente Luque was racking up far more wins than losses in his UFC run, he knew he wasn't taking advantage of all his skills.
Thus, after back-to-back losses, he did a full reassessment. He's been away from the game since a loss to Geoff Neal on Aug. 6, 2022, and knew he needed to make some positive changes. The results of those changes will be on display Saturday in Las Vegas at Apex when he meets former lightweight champion Rafael dos Anjos in the main event of UFC Vegas 78.
"In reality, I hadn't developed as much as I could have in the time I had," Luque told Yahoo Sports. "I was fighting too often, so I wasn't changing much. From one fight to the next, I had two or three months and that just kind of made me predictable. That's how I felt when I fought Geoff, a guy who is really tough."
The result is that he didn't perform to his own standards. He said repeatedly during a conversation with Yahoo Sports that he has all the tools he needs to be on top, but he hasn't always put everything together.
That's harsh because he's 21-9 going into the fight with dos Anjos and he has wins over the likes of former champion Tyron Woodley, Belal Muhammad, Jalin Turner, Niko Price and Michael Chiesa, among others.
But Luque doesn't want to be just another guy, and the cold hard reality of his situation is that no matter how talented he is, no matter how hard he works, he's just 4-3 in his past seven. In such a competitive division, treading water that way isn't going to get him anywhere near where he wants to be.
He moved full-time to Florida to work regularly with coach Henri Hooft and his staff. He thought of his performance against Neal and it was clear changes had to be made. He'd worked with Hooft part-time since 2014, but did the bulk of his training in his native Brazil. After the loss to Neal, he decided he needed fundamental changes.
It was all on him. He wasn't putting anything on his coaches in Brazil. He was stubborn — and still is, a bit, he said, chuckling — and wasn't open to making adjustments until he was forced to do so.
"It was hard for me at that point because I wasn't able to just react," Luque said. "I had my mind closed to everything but what I was doing. That's why I said I needed to reinvent myself."
Luque is confident the changes he's made are going to change his fortunes. He is excited to see how it works against dos Anjos, a 38-year-old whom he greatly respects.
Luque is younger and probably more athletic at this stage, but dos Anjos has learned how to make his skills work for him. That's what Luque is trying to do.
"I feel this fight is the perfect fight for the moment I'm in," Luque said. "There's no better way to test yourself and see where you have grown than against a guy like RDA, a former champion and a guy who has fought so many five-rounders and a guy who is so well-rounded. In the past, it might have been a much tougher fight in the sense I would have thought, 'Yeah, I'm not sure this is a good matchup for me.'
"But now, I have no doubt about how good of a fight this is for me because it's going to put me to the test and it's going to permit me to show all of my development, everything I've trained for."
Luque is confident, but he's also realistic and he's definitely not trying to fool himself. He believes he has done the work and made the changes that he has needed to make for a while. But he knows it's one thing to do it in the gym, where coaches are controlling the environment and drills can be run repeatedly until one gets it right.
It's often different when the bright lights and the TV cameras go on and Luque understands the ultimate proof is to do it on fight night.
