Glory’s Gerges on fighting ‘strange’ UFC vet: I’m ‘old-school’, I’ll ‘take two punches to give one’

Hesdy Gerges (49-16-1, 23 KO’s) and Guto Inocente (31-7, 17 KO’s) are fighting in the co-main event of GLORY 33 NEW JERSEY on September 9. They’re booked on a card headlined by heavyweight champion Rico Verhoeven defending his title in the main event against Brazilian veteran Anderson “Braddock” Silva (no relation to, but a friend and training partner of, former UFC middleweight champion Anderson “Spider” Silva).

The Dutch-Egyptian Gerges’ title campaign took an immediate backwards step when his fight with Ismael Londt at GLORY 31 AMSTERDAM earlier this year resulted in a decision for Londt. The result was bitterly disputed by Gerges and a lot of fans agreed with him. He holds no ill-will towards Londt – they are friendly outside the ring – but can’t say the same for the judges who adjudicated that fight.

“I am OK with it, you can’t do anything about it. It happened and that’s it. I think everyone around the world who saw the fight saw me as the winner. So maybe on paper I lost by decision but I really take it as a win, not a loss. Sometimes it happens in this sport. I don’t really know what to say. At the moment in this sport we are seeing quite a lot of bad decisions. I think there are some judges who are not really of a high level,” he shrugs.

“I don’t feel like we saw as many bad decisions back in the day. Or sometimes you would get a bad decision but there was an argument for it, like OK yeah, I can maybe see how they arrived at that decision. But some of the decisions we are seeing recently it’s like they aren’t even debatable, they are just obviously bad decisions, not correct. I think it’s something which will need to be addressed if it continues because it’s bad for the sport and the fans.”

Moving forward, Gerges is looking forward to a fight with one of the most stylistically unusual combatants in kickboxing. Inocente first started training at age four, taught by his father in a kickboxing style heavily influenced by karate and Taekwondo. He later trained in Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu Jitsu …

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