MMABay – Welcome to England! Is this your first visit? What are your first impressions and what do you have planned for the week?Salaverry – Thank you! This is my first time in the UK, and it’s cool! It’s not bad at all, I enjoy it! I love the scenery, I love the architecture, it’s beautiful.
MMABay – So do you have any plans for sight-seeing this week?
Salaverry – Absolutely, oh yeah. We’re definitely gonna tour around a little bit.
MMABay – Checking out the Palace?
Salaverry – Yes, all that! All the touristy stuff! (Laughs).
MMABay – Last time we saw you fight was three years ago at UFC 84; can you fill us in on what you’ve been doing since then?
Salaverry – I’ve been taking care of my school. I have a school over in Seattle and ah, we’ve been building it up. We have a great curriculum of wrestling, submission wrestling, boxing, kickboxing, taking care of the competition teams and the fight team.
MMABay – You’re coming out of a three year retirement for this fight; can you tell us how that came about, and why you’re coming out of retirement now?
Salaverry – It just…it calls on you, it really does. I mean I was training with the younger guys, and I was doing well with them. The cage really calls on you, you miss the fans, you miss the crowd, this whole way of life is a really exciting lifestyle…it called me.
MMABay – You took this fight on just a few weeks’ notice, how has your training been and how are you feeling physically in the run up to the fight?
Salaverry – Yeah! I’m good with it. The one thing is that we’ve been talking with BAMMA for a bit now and so it’s not like I haven’t been training. Once we started talking and negotiating we started our camp. So we’ve been training for a while, we just switched gears a little bit on tweaking certain techniques for Matt, but other than that we’ve just been training!
MMABay – Your opponent on Saturday night is Matt Ewin; what do you know about Matt as a fighter, and how do you think the two of you stack up?
Salaverry – Well, he likes to roll, he has a good strong shot and, uh, and he likes to grapple. He’s a strong guy! So I’ve been trying to work a little bit on my grappling experience as well as my wrestling experience to counter that.
MMABay – It must be interesting for you, because us Brits are normally known for our striking, where as Matt is noted for his ground game. Presumably you’re confident with going to the ground with him? Is that where you see the fight ending up?
Salaverry – It will! (Laughs) There’s not even (a question) about it. I’m sure it will. I can’t wait really! Hopefully…(pauses)…the one thing that I hope for is that the crowd will be receptive to a grappling match, or an MMA grappling match. A lot of times if the audience is not educated on the grappling it tends to be somewhat boring (for them). Hopefully people will see it and be like “Oh wow, those techniques were wonderful, look at the reversals, the submission attempts!” and they’ll be excited for it!
MMABay – From personal experience, the BAMMA crowd does seem to be quite an educated crowd, I don’t know if you saw the Ricco Rodriguez fight from last time?
Salaverry – Yeah!
MMABay – It might not have been the most “action packed” fight compared to say, the Paul Daley knock-out in the main event, but the BAMMA crowd were very respectful of it. What’s your general impression of UK fight fans, if you have one?
Salaverry – Well that’s the thing about it, when you sit watching the previous BAMMA fights online, and you see the excitement, (the fact that) people appreciate that there’s not just a knock out situation in a fight, but that there’s wrestling, there’s takedowns, there’s control, submission attempts…all of that. It’s a completely different variable than just striking and the crowd was receptive to it, so that’s good! I’m excited about that!
MMABay – Matt is also coming off a three year lay-off; but he did have a tune-up fight earlier this year – do you think that gives him any kind of advantage going into your fight?
Salaverry – No, no…I’m an old fart! (Laughs) I’m used to this, there’s no now things, I’ve been to the circus and it’s not my first rodeo so all in all, I’m just excited to go to this venue and excited to perform in front of the British audience.
MMABay – As we said, you took this fight on short notice; are you taking things one fight at a time? Is there a plan for you going forward?
Salaverry – Not at all. It’s a fight by fight situation. I wanna test myself with Matt, I wanna test myself with BAMMA, see how it goes. If it goes great…if not, then we go back to the drawing board.
MMABay – MMA is finally catching on here in the UK to the same extent it is in North America; for any new MMA fans who may never have seen you fight before, what can they Expect from Ivan Salaverry on May 21st?
Salaverry – Well, firstly I’m very appreciative to be in front of the audience, truly. From Matt’s experience, this will likely go to the ground…they will see techniques and situations that are going to be mostly of a grappling nature. I hope they appreciate it, because we’re gonna be rolling hard!
MMABay – Do you have anyone you’d like to thanks or sponsors you’d like to mention?
Salaverry – Honestly I’d like to thank all my guys at home, all my fellows who train with me, which is Johnny Flavin, my agent, and obviously BAMMA for letting me participate in their promotion.
MMABay – Thanks for your time Ivan, and good luck!
Salaverry – Thank you so much!
BAMMA 6: Watson vs Ninja from Wembley Arena airs live and exclusively at 9pm GMT on SyFy in the UK (Sky/HD 114, Virgin TV 135 and TalkTalk 22), The Fight Network in Canada and BAMMA.tv world-wide on May 21st. BAMMA would like to thank Lillywhites of London for hosting the press conference and Lonsdale, the official glove partners of BAMMA.
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