“I can’t complain though: I get to see the world, I get to hang out, I get to get paid to punch somebody in the face,” Alex Perez said this week after arriving in Macau, where he will meet Sumudaerji on the main card of Saturday’s UFC Fight Night at Galaxy Arena.
Perez, 34, is fighting internationally again after a recent stretch that has pushed him far beyond the California venues where he spent the first phase of his career. Through his first 34 mixed‑martial‑arts fights he never left the United States; he never fought outside California until he reached the UFC roster via a win on the first season of Dana White’s Contender Series.
The move to Macau completes a rapid shift in travel for Perez: last November he fought in Doha, Qatar, then returned to Las Vegas to appear on the UFC 324 prelims at T‑Mobile Arena against Charles Johnson, and now he is on the main card in China. That pattern — three very different locales in three outings — matters because it puts a veteran who built his record at home into a series of unfamiliar environments on short notice.
There is an immediate friction in Perez’s recent story. After he dispatched Johnson in the first round in Las Vegas, Perez described that training camp as “the toughest of his career,” and he also admitted mistakes that carried consequences. He missed weight by two‑and‑a‑half pounds for the Johnson bout, drew a 25 percent fine of his purse and was ineligible for post‑fight bonuses. “I shot myself in the foot with some stuff, and you know how life is,” Perez said. “Actions have consequences. I messed up and had some consequences, so working through all that stuff, so it was just on the personal side, a lot of battles going on.”
Perez framed the misstep as a physical and personal battle rather than a crisis. “I didn’t feel stressed, but obviously my body did, so that’s why the weight‑cut was a little rough,” he said in the same interview. He added he likes the gamble of fighting on short or high‑stakes terms: “I always like to gamble on myself, so if you’re putting me in there on the last fight of my deal, I gotta go out there and show out? I’ll take those odds every day.”
Those remarks were made after a win that followed a loss to Asu Almabayev the prior November, and they came with another practical note: Perez said he and Johnson were friends who had trained and lived together in the past, an uncommon intimacy that framed the Las Vegas encounter.
Perez’s presence on the Macau card answers the question of where he is fighting next: Galaxy Arena on Saturday, on the main broadcast. It also answers whether he has fought abroad before — yes, most recently in Doha, but only after a long U.S. run of 34 fights — and it captures how he feels about traveling for work. “I like it better when I’m coaching; I can enjoy the food and all that stuff, right?” he said, undercut immediately by the practical reality that he prefers the life of a fighter for the opportunities it brings.
The most consequential open question now is clear: can Perez translate his domestic resume and his willingness to “gamble on myself” into the kind of consistent performances the UFC rewards on the international stage? He arrives in Macau having fought in two of his last three outings outside his long‑time home base, and the result against Sumudaerji will say whether the recent turbulence — a tough camp, a weigh‑in miss and a contract moment he has previously described as the last fight of his deal — was a hiccup or part of a larger trend.
For now, Perez is where he said he wanted to be: traveling, fighting and betting on himself. Saturday’s main‑card bell at Galaxy Arena will decide whether that bet pays off.
