At UFC 228, Tatiana Suarez will put her unbeaten record on the line when she takes on former strawweight champion Carla Esparza in the feature FX prelim. For the first time in both young fighters’ careers, they will be facing another competitor who is elite in the discipline that they excel at: wrestling. And that is a fact that excites Suarez:
“It’s a great matchup, and I think it’s the fight everyone wanted to see,” Tatiana Suarez told MMA Fighting. “I mean, even my boyfriend wanted to see it. He said, ‘Oh my god, I’ve been wanting you to fight her for so long!’ She’s a wrestler, I’m a wrestler, and I think a lot of times when two people are good at those two things it makes for an exciting fight.”
A win over Carla Esparza would be Suarez’s second win over a ranked opponent and her fourth UFC victory. A serious case can be made that with a victory over Esparza, Suarez will be on the short list of names for a potential title shot outside of the Jessica Andrade/Karolina Kowalkiewicz winner, a fight which will take place on the same card. However, Suarez is in no rush. She is aware that her time is coming, regardless of how long it takes:
“I’m not one of those people who’s like, I need [a title shot] now, or at this time,” she says. “I’m enjoying my journey, and all I care about is who is in front of me. I don’t worry about the next person beyond what’s in front of me. I do think about when I beat Carla, I’ll probably be this number. Then I’ll probably fight somebody else, then Rose [Namajunas] or whatever. But I don’t put it in my head that, ‘I need to win this fight because I need to get a title shot.’ I put in my head, ‘I need to win this fight because someone else is trying to beat me.”
Suarez’s confidence has been instilled through overcoming life-altering roadblocks like cancer and a lifelong commitment to perfecting her craft. And although she has yet to lose a round in her MMA career, the “Female Khabib” maintains that we’ve only seen a spec of her actual capabilities:
“I feel like I’m always learning,” she says. “If I have a mindset like, ‘I’m 27 and wise, and I’ve been through so much stuff,’ I’m never going to grow as a person or as a martial artist. So for me, I’m still young and dumb. I know that I generally make good decisions. I’m not a crazy partier, nothing like that. I definitely think that I’m maturing and I just feel like I have so much more growing to do as a martial artist.”
“I feel like people have seen 1% of what I can do,” she says. “When everything starts coming together, and I think it will within the next couple of years, I 100 percent believe nobody will be able to stop me. My stand-up is constantly developing, and once I start incorporating all of it together, I really don’t believe anybody can stop me.”
Do you believe Tatiana Suarez will remain undefeated through 2019?
