Jamahal Hill has a response for anyone disappointed in the UFC 300 main event announcement.
Following the conclusion of UFC 298 this past Saturday, UFC CEO Dana White announced that the headlining bout for the historic UFC 300 event on April 13 will feature light heavyweight champion Alex Pereira defending against Hill. According to Hill, the booking came to fruition over the course of 48 hours, and he’s been paying attention to how the public has reacted to the news.
White had been boasting for months that he had a huge matchup planned to close out UFC 300 and Hill says that the official announcement hasn’t been universally acclaimed.
“The reaction to this has been kind of a mix of things and there and whatnot,” Hill said on his YouTube channel. “There’s been a lot of outrage, a lot of disappointment and things like that. To be honest, it’s crazy to me because for the most part a lot of these people are the same people that have spent the better part of a year or however long calling me ‘cry baby,’ but it’s crazy to see how a card can be stacked—the main card literally has a former champion or champion in every single fight and some even facing former champions. In every single fight in the main card, each one of the prelims is worthy of being its own separate main event and people are crying. Like, let’s really be real. It’s really, really crying because you had unreal expectations for something.
“Granted, I feel Dana did overstep with some of the comments that he made, but he had every intention on delivering on those comments. As you know, anybody who’s followed the UFC for some time, whenever Dana tries to tell you he’s trying to deliver something, he wouldn’t talk like that if he wasn’t trying to deliver something that you people would feel is mind-blowing or otherworldly. Instead, you got one of the most technical, guaranteed banger of a fights that you could ask for at this time with serious implications in historically one of the best weight divisions in the UFC. And people are complaining.”
The Pereira-Hill bout is expected to bring further clarity to a light heavyweight division that was thrown into chaos after Jiri Prochazka defeated Glover Teixeira for the title in June 2022. An injury forced Prochazka to relinquish the title leading to Jan Blachowicz and Magomed Ankalaev fighting to a draw for the vacant belt, Hill winning that belt with a dominant decision victory over Teixeira, and then Hill also having to relinquish the belt due to injury. Pereira captured the vacant title this past November with a second-round TKO of Prochazka.
Despite all that baked-in drama, Hill is aware that it’s not enough for some fans and wonders if any UFC 300 main event announcement would have pleased the majority at this point.
“I think I saw one comment that said, ‘I was expecting Conor vs. Jesus Himself,’ Hill said. “At this point, now I’m convinced that wouldn’t have been enough. Y’all could have got Mario vs. King Kong, y’all could have got Wolverine vs. Iron Man, you could have gotten anything, Hulk vs. Superman, Spider-Man vs. Batman, you could have got any of this and you wouldn’t have been happy. So all I can say as far as the whole ‘this is a disappointment’ and it not being worthy of this spot and things like that is that’s crazy.
“Whenever you pay for a fight, do you not want somebody who’s coming to take somebody’s head off? To knock somebody out that has very, very, very high-level skills and the capability of doing so. You’ve got that on both ends in this fight. I put it on the line every time. Every single fight, go and watch any fight, I’m coming forward, I’m putting it all on the line, I’m taking risk, and I’m giving everything for the show. For the disrespect to flood in the way that it is about a fight that a lot of people have asked for. I’m going to keep it a thousand, I was there, I did the fan experience in Anaheim. That’s all people were asking. That’s all people wanted. A lot of fans, a lot of true, true fans, that’s what they wanted. They wanted this for UFC 300.”
Hill aims to regain the light heavyweight title after he ruptured his Achilles this past July. He’s also dealing with ongoing legal matters after he was arrested in November for allegedly assaulting his brother.
Ahead of what will be his first fight in 15 months, Hill wants the world to know that he is 100 percent ready to compete.
“Another one of the big questions has been my health, ‘he’s rushing back’ and things like that,” Hill said. “No, I’m not rushing back. I’ve been training, I’ve been sparring, I’ve been at a full go now for a few weeks now. There’s been no setbacks, nothing hindering anything. When I’m saying full go I mean this is me doing everything full speed, full-on like I would when I normally train, so there’s no concerns.
“My Achilles is not an issue, it’s not a problem at all. I’m just ready to go.”
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