Steve Erceg Reveals How His Father Motivated Him to Stick with MMA

Steve Erceg’s father initially provided the motivation for one of the world’s best flyweights to not give up on mixed martial arts.

Erceg will look to get back into title contention against Kai Kara-France in the co-main event at UFC 305 in Perth, Australia, on Saturday. The Australian looks to bounce back from a hard-fought title loss against Alexandre Pantoja, where he silenced his doubters who considered him undeserving of the title shot in the first place.

Erceg recently revealed that he was about to leave the sport almost as soon as he started training. Erceg was first intrigued by the sport of MMA when he saw Frank Mir submit a visibly larger Brock Lesnar at UFC 81 in 2008. The urge to figure out how Mir did what he did led Erceg to Wilkies Martial Arts at the age of 14.

While Erceg had started training with the intention of competing, he was joined by his father Matthew Erceg, who needed to lose some weight. However, it was “Astro Boy” who first stopped turning up at the gym. But his father continued to train and would come back home with details from training, which motivated Erceg to start training again.

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"I wanted to start MMA to compete,” Erceg said on UFC 305 Embedded. “I don’t think my dad knew that to start with. He wanted to lose weight anyway at the time, so he decided to join at the same time I started. And luckily for me, he did. Because I actually, I didn’t wan to keep doing it, but he kept going. And then he started coming home and telling me about all the chokes he was doing, the sparring and all these things that I originally started to do. So it all sort of brought me back to the sport, and we haven’t stopped since.”

When Erceg wanted to compete for the first time after just two years of training, his father did not think he was tough enough. The future UFC fighter got the nod after passing a small litmus test scrap in the backyard with his father, and the rest is history.

While he is just four fights into his UFC tenure, Erceg paid his dues on the regional circuit, as the loss to Pantoja was his first in 13 outings since 2018. Meanwhile, Kara-France is coming off consecutive losses against former champ Brandon Moreno and top contender Amir Albazi.