Mike Pierce reacts after knocking out Aaron Simpson during their welterweight fight at UFC on FX in October. Photo by Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images.
You can put UFC on FX 6’s Mike Pierce any place on the planet to fight, and it won’t change his approach.
The welterweight will fly all the way to the other side of the world in Australia to fight Seth Baczynski, but it doesn’t matter how far he has to travel, he said. Fighting is fighting, no matter where it happens.
“It doesn’t really make a difference to me,” Pierce said in response to fighting far away from home in the land down under. “At the end of the day, he and I are both stepping into an octagon and we have to perform and beat the crap out of each other.”
Despite the lengthy travel, Pierce is going into the fight with the same idea that he’s had in all his previous contests: getting the hand raised. After all, both he and his opponent will deal with the same extreme time change.
Both of them have to acclimate, Pierce explained.
“He’s flying from Arizona, I’m flying from Oregon, so the time change and acclimating to all that is relatively the same,” he said.
In terms of MMA, Australia will be the first country Pierce has fought in as a professional outside of the United States. But regardless of the lack pro fights outside of his home country, the 170-pounder has made his rounds hopping the globe.
Most recently and over the last year, Pierce has done tours with the UFC, visiting troops in several places in the Middle East. He landed in places like Qatar, Oman and Kuwait, and said It was a great experience.
“It was a lot of fun,” Pierce said about his visits with American soldiers. “I got to meet a lot of cool people.”
The trip to the American military bases was the first time Pierce made international travel since high school. He was part of a cultural exchange wrestling team that went to Budapest, Hungary, and while there they worked with the Swedish and Hungarian world teams.
“It was an interesting time,” he said, reflecting on his teenage years in a foreign country. “It was very cool for them because they were used to listening to the way the English talk and how they pronounce things. Americans obviously sound a lot different.”
Despite the language barrier, Pierce took the experience as one where he learned a great deal of things and got better as a wrestler. It’s translated well into MMA, he said, and helped humble him for the hard roads in the UFC.
“Once you get to that point where you think you know everything, someone’s going to catch you and humble you really quickly,” he said. “I still try to [remember] that philosophy … and stay humble.”
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