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If you want to see what it looks like to truly believe, go back and watch Jiří Procházka’s face during his fight with Aleksandr Rakic at . Watch closely as he walks to the center of the cage, circling with his hands low and his topknot high. Keep watching as he swings and misses, as he takes leg kicks and eats a right cross.

He keeps coming forward that whole first round and very little of that plan seems to be working for him. By the time he returns to his corner he will have lost the first round on every scorecard. He’ll have landed just 16 strikes to Rakic’s 38.



He will also still wear the exact same expression that he started with, no hint of a change, not even the faintest glimmer of worry wrinkling its way above his prodigious beard. For all eight minutes and 17 seconds of the fight, he fought like it never even occurred to him that he could lose. Looking back now, he sees his approach in that first round as perhaps a little bit “unprofessional.

” “I let Aleksandr hit me too much,” Procházka told Yahoo Sports this week. “I let him leave his damage, trying to make him work. But sometimes I'm working like that because I need to target my opponent really well.

And sometimes I don't care about these small damages because I believe when I find the target and when I catch him, that's my game then.” He was right, of course. In the second round he finally found Rakic with his right hand.

The storm of punches that followed would earn Procházka a TKO vi.

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