Alberto El Patron says he feels good about the overall journey back to the MMA ring despite losing to Tito Ortiz last year.
In his first interview since their fight, Alberto spoke with MMA Junkie about the Combate Americas fight between himself and Ortiz, which saw him lose decisively after tapping out to a rear-naked choke at 3:10 of the first round. Alberto says the mental battle after a big loss like that is another fight in itself, but he feels that he gave everything he could during training.
“You have to live another battle because you have to deal with the fact that you lost in a fight, that there’s a better man than you, that you trained so hard for so many months and that wasn’t enough. But after processing the loss, I felt good about it because I trained hard,” Alberto said, “I gave it my all in the training camp. It was tough adapting to the cage and I think a lot of people don’t understand that it’s night and day fighting in a cage as opposed to a ring. It’s completely different.”
Alberto also noted how much MMA changed since his last fight nine years ago, saying everyone is a more balanced fighter compared to back then. Alberto said more preparation might have given him a better shot at winning, but he’s pretty content with how things went down.
“I leave happy, I didn’t have any major injuries from the fight, I don’t think I looked bad against a legend like Tito Ortiz,” Alberto said, “and I leave mixed martial arts happy. I’ll just continue growing talent with Combate Americas and keep doing what we’ve been doing from the beginning.”
Despite the clean fight by Ortiz, Del Rio is confident he could have won the matchup by taking a better approach to the fight as well as ring rust.
“I think I could’ve won that fight, I really do,” Del Rio said. “I made some mistakes with the strategy but once again the would’ve doesn’t exist. Ring rust is real and it was there. I made two big mistakes and with someone as experienced as Tito that’s deadly.”
