“He was a really stout kid,” recalled Erosa. “We fought at ’55 I think and I was walking like six or seven pounds heavier than that, but I didn’t look it. I was a tall, skinny, scared kid and he was a Mexican kid with a lot of tattoos, he was buff, and he looked intimidating.”
Welcome to the pros.
“Just out the gate, that was something I had to overcome,” he said. “It was the intimidation of everything else besides that actual fighting. I think that’s one of the biggest things for a lot of people in their first fight, to get over the intimidation of a crowd, the intimidation of the way your opponent looks, maybe even the intimidation of stories you’ve heard of your opponent.”
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It’s okay, Erosa did just fine, stopping Diaz in two minutes and 16 seconds.
“Luckily, I was able to see things pretty clearly in the fight,” he said. “I was pretty easygoing, fun and didn’t really care about much, so it was kind of easy for me to turn all that outside stuff off and just get in there and focus on the task at hand. I saw a couple openings and was able to capitalize on those.”
Already hooked, Erosa kept winning, and seven or eight fights in, he came to the realization that this might be more than just something fun to do. By 2015, he was on The Ultimate Fighter, and while there have been some ups and downs in the ensuing years, as 2022 dawns, Erosa is in the UFC and on a nice run where he’s won four of his last five bouts, three in the Octagon. And though he was good back in 2010, he finally feels like everything is clicking.