Alex Pereira's Journey to Success

By E. Rizkallah

The year was 2002, Alex Pereira, a 14-year-old boy at the time who lived in the favelas of São Paulo got a job at a local tire shop to help support his family. They were a family of 9 and they all lived together in a small house which his dad built by himself in the favelas of São Paulo. Alex started working full time at the tire shop because he couldn't study like the other kids and knew that studying wasn't for him. As he started getting to know all the employees of the tire shop, he started getting close to them and after 6 months he was one of the best employees of the shop. His boss said he was strong, and he was the hardest working employee there. While he became really focused on the tire shop, his brother started to get into bad habits involving drugs and got really into selling drugs in the favela they lived in. This really drove him and his brother apart because he did not want to get involved with this type of activity. Although he didn't want to get involved with drugs he also started to gain some bad habits from his co workers in the tire shop. They started to get him into drinking alcohol and by the time he was 15 he couldn't go one day without drinking. He used to drink about 1L of cachaça every day. This led him down a bad road and was getting worse every day. After some time, he knew he had to change but every time he tried quitting he would get back into it after a few days. By 19 year old, he found out that one thing people do to get over drinking was sports, he was never good in soccer which was famous in Brazil and he knew it wasn't for him. Thats what eventually got him into kickboxing.  
 
In 2012, Alex was 25 years old, by that time he already had 2 sons but he was still struggling. He had already spent 4 years trying to quit drinking. He was fighting Jason Wilness, and got knocked down by a punch to his liver, he barely got up and he then continued to fight. With only 18 seconds remaining of the second round, he gets kicked in the leg and can't keep fighting and loses that fight by technical knockout. That fight was what made him feel that he really needed to quit drinking and that his life was already falling apart and would get even worse if he continued on the path he was going. Thats when he met his soon to be mentor, Belocqua Wera. When Wera was training Alex, he punched him in the stomach while working on sparring. That was when Wera noticed that at Alex's current stage, which he was drinking around 1L of cachaça per day, he was weak and Wera questioned if he was worth training or if he was just waiting his time. Alex then got up from that punch, and Wera saw the anger in his eyes and he noticed that Alex wasn't weak but instead he was a warrior but he was rotten inside due to all the drinking. Wera then decided to show Alex his indigenous side and he thought that it would be the turning point to help him get off drinking.  
In his next fight, everyone could see that Alex was a changed man, his plan to get off drinking worked and it really paid off. He then went on to win almost every fight and went on to becoming state champion, pan American and south American champion too. He finally thought and felt like a champion not only in the ring but also in life. But then was when someone would come and try to take it all away from him.  

In 2016 he went to China to fight the soon to be UFC champion Israel Adesanya. He didn't imagine that would be a hard fight because he was bigger and stronger than his opponent. That fight went the distance and Alex was shocked during the fight because Adesanya's technique was something that he had never seen before. Both fighters had assumed that Adesanya had won that fight by a sheer miracle, the judge raised Alex's hand and even he was shocked by that decision. They fought again in 2017, in Brazil this time, and Alex managed to knock out Adesanya. This put their rivalry to a pause and no one expected them to ever fight again. Alex went on to fighting in Glory kickboxing champion and managed to win in 2 weight divisions. After Adesanya's loss against Alex, he went on to fight for the UFC in MMA. Adesanya managed to become a UFC champion which is one of the biggest MMA companies in the world and the fighters there are considered to be the best in the world. Alex just stayed in Glory kickboxing and was not getting even close to the amount of fame that Adesanya was. 
Everything would have stayed the same and both fighters would not have met again if it wasn't for an interview which Adesanya talked bad about Alex. He mentioned how he is a world champion now and how Alex always talks about him. This made Alex want to join the UFC to prove everyone wrong. Normally, it takes years for a fighter to get a chance to fight the champion of their weight class because they must slowly move up the rankings in their weight division. But, due to their past rivalry, this sped up the process for Alex and after only 1 year in the UFC, he got a chance to compete for the championship belt against Israel Adesanya. It was an intense fight and Alex almost got knocked out in the first round but got saved by the bell. Everyone thought that in the next round it would be over for him, but he managed to stay in the fight and keep up with Adesanya's difficult technique. Alex managed to knock out Adesanya in the final round with less than 2 minutes remaining. And that night he became the UFC champion of the world. 
Alex is still a Champion to this day and has defended his title multiple times against different opponents and has even moved up a weight division and is champion in the light heavy weight division now. His fights are always one of the most exciting to watch because he always ends them early by knocking his opponent out. This is how Alex Pereira managed to go from a man dealing with drinking problems and working in a tire shop, to becoming one of the best fighters in the world.