Pat Healy Hopes to Regain Titan FC Lightweight Title, Make Second Run in UFC

Pat Healy is a handful for his opponent no matter who it is.

The Oregonian has taken on a who’s who of the MMA world and though he’s dropped many of those fights, he’s also scored plenty of wins over elite-level fighters throughout his career.

On Friday night in the featured bout of Titan Fighting championship 39, Healy expects to win back his lightweight title, something he inexplicably lost at the scale last September. After being stripped of the belt for missing weight, Healy dropped a split decision to Rick Hawn at Titan FC 35; Hawn retired shortly after winning lightweight gold. It was a litany of things that led up to “Bam Bam” being overweight, something he said will never happen again.

“It was embarrassing,” he told Sherdog.com in a recent interview. “I never thought of myself as one of those guys who would miss weight. I was a little injured going into that fight; I hurt my ribs training down in New Mexico. But, really, it was a blunder on my behalf and it was the first time I had ever missed weight. I knew about two weeks out that I was having some problems and I didn’t really have a dietary plan in terms of cutting weight and I started making little mistakes that compounded it. I started to panic during the last week and started trying all sorts of different things at the last minute and nothing worked.”

Healy will oppose fellow veteran Gesias Cavalcante for the vacant 155-pound strap at the BankUnited Center in Coral Gables, Fla., in a card streaming on UFC Fight Pass beginning at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT. A Dream, Strikeforce and World Series of Fighting veteran, the Brazilian known as “JZ” owns notable wins over the likes of Tyson Griffin, Bobby Green, Katsunori Kikuno, Nam Phan, Caol Uno and Michihiro Omigawa, to name a few.

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“I know he’s a really tough opponent,” Healy said. “I’ve watched a ton of film on him and I think we line up for a good, action-packed fight. We both do similar things and I think I can bait him into a clinch with my wrestling. He’s a veteran and he won’t be taken out easily if I get him into a bad position. But if he gets me down a lot and is on top, his top game and leg submissions are very good. If he gets a lot of takedowns, that could present a lot of problems for me.”

One thing Healy has in his favor is the fact that he’s been consistently fighting, unlike the Brazilian. Cavalcante hasn’t fought in 19 months and Healy is intrigued to see how he’ll come out, though he expects to see the best “JZ” there is.

“Listening to him talking leading up to this fight, he seems to be all right,” he stated. “I don’t think his mental state will be affected by this at all but we’ll see how he does physically. I will really push the pace because his last fight was at 185 so we’ll see how hard that weight cut was on him and what it will do to him in the ring.”

Once Healy topples Cavalcante, he said, his vision is quite simple: dominate Titan FC and fulfill the destiny that has thus far eluded him in his storied career.

“I want to be the guy at the top of Titan FC and I so badly want to get back to the UFC,” he revealed. “I don’t want to just be the guy who made it to the UFC; I want to relevant. I want to actually win fights in the UFC. I don’t want to go down with four losses and a “No Contest” in my last run in the UFC. It will forever haunt me. I can’t be the guy who spent his entire career in Triple-A and then got the call to the majors and then blundered it. I have to make things right.”