UFC 250: Chase Hooper embraces his ‘weird nerdy kid’ persona
By Ben Coate
Chase Hooper spoke to FanSided ahead of his UFC 250 fight.
At just 20-years old, UFC featherweight Chase Hooper is far from the typical professional MMA fighter. Still months away from legally purchasing his first beer, Hooper, with his skinny build, baby face, and mop of curly hair, doesn’t exactly look the part of a 10-fight MMA veteran and one of the UFC’s rising stars. For Hooper, though, that’s just who he is and he’s not interested in being anything else.
“I’m not just like every other fighter,” Hooper told FanSided. “I’m a young kid who’s not intimidating at all. But if I tried to be intimidating, it just wouldn’t be genuine. That’s just not who I am, and I think people can definitely see that.”
Indeed, with just one fight in the UFC (a win over Daniel Teymur at UFC 245), Hooper has already garnered a certain amount of attention from fans, as well as a promotional push from the UFC. Rather than just blending into the UFC’s massive roster of fighters, Hooper is setting himself apart simply by being himself, and being himself means he won’t always be the image of a stereotypical fighter.
Again, Hooper thinks breaking the mold is a good thing.
“People saw how much momentum [Conor McGregor] got just from his trash talking, and they tried to copy it, and it doesn’t work out as well. You gotta show your personality and not necessarily make that something that you think people would like.”
Just two weeks after his 17th birthday, Hooper had his first amateur fight. At 18, he had his first professional fight, and at 20 he made his UFC debut. With so much early and rapid success at such a young age, it would be easy to assume that he would be brash and cocky, loud and aggressive, and always ready to show off his prodigious combat talents. According to Hooper, though, that couldn’t be further from the truth.
“I’ve always been the weird nerdy kid, I guess,” Hooper said. “Through all my school stuff, probably 90 percent of the people I graduated with don’t even know me, and they would only know me now because of the fighting stuff. Which is just because I was always the kind of guy that kept my head down, doing my schoolwork, kept everything in line so I could just go to the gym and train. I didn’t go to any parties… I was always just in the gym, just quiet, just grinding, just focusing on my goals and it brought me here so I think I did the right thing.”
“I think that the experience gap is definitely real…”
At UFC 250, Hooper will square off with Alex Caceres, a UFC veteran for nearly 10 years that has fought some of the sport’s best talents, including Urijah Faber and Yair Rodriguez. Hooper acknowledges that Caceres has a significant experience advantage, but believes it cuts both ways.
“I think that the experience gap is definitely real, but the fact is that with all that experience and all those fights in the UFC, for him it’s just another fight so he doesn’t have the same drive, I feel like… It’d be hard to stay in the UFC for a decade and not wake up hurting in the morning.”
Of course, Hooper is motivated and driven to pick up his second UFC win. He believes that his focus on quality over quantity in training over the past few months will help him greatly against Caceres.
Hooper also recognizes that he’s in a unique position with the UFC’s promotional push behind him, but that push will only be there as long as he’s able to perform in the cage. He knows that he can be as likeable and endearing as any fighter in the world, but he’ll lose much of that goodwill if he can’t deliver on fight night.
“I’ve only had one UFC fight and I already have this much exposure, which is kinda crazy when you think about it,” he said. “Not a lot of fighters get that kind of stuff… Obviously the UFC has been pushing me a little bit, but I also think it’s because people like my personality, so it’s now on me to live up to the level of hype that’s there.”
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