For a few seconds, Westin Wilson thought the night of UFC Vegas 93 couldn’t have been any better — from getting his first UFC win and his first UFC finish as the biggest underdog on the card against Jeka Saragih, to reading online on a prominent MMA website that he got a $50,000 performance bonus.
That is, until it turned out the report was inaccurate.
“[An MMA website] announced it, they announced that I got it,” Wilson told MMA Fighting. “I was like, [‘I got a bonus.’] So I texted my manager and I’m like, ‘Did I get it?’ And he was like, ‘No,’ and I was like, ‘What?’”
In the end, the performance bonuses officially went to Tatsuro Taira and Brady Hiestand, while Gabriella Fernandes and Carli Judice earned Fight of the Night honors.
The confusion not only stemmed from the report being wrong, but for everything involved with the finish, and the entirety of the event itself. Wilson got the only first-round finish on the card, and did so with just the 12th triangle-armbar submission in UFC history as a nearly 3-to-1 underdog.
As the card progressed, finishes were few and far between, and when the main event ended with Taira earning a second-round TKO against Alex Perez due to an unfortunate injury, Wilson believed he was a shoo-in for the bonus.
“Coach [Thompson] and I were like, ‘Yeah, we got it,’” Westin explained. “Because [I thought] there was only four finishes on the card: One was an injury TKO and they never give a performance bonus for that, and two were rear-naked chokes in the third round. Mine was a first-round finish, I was the biggest underdog, and I was like, ‘It had to be me,’ and then when it wasn’t, I was so depressed, like, ‘Oh, man!’”
Wilson told MMA Fighting that he personally asked matchmaker Sean Shelby for one more shot after suffering stoppage losses to Joanderson Brito and Jean Silva to begin his UFC run. The UFC gave him his wish, but against another powerful striker with knockout ability.
In preparation, Wilson worked a lot on the mental side of things, including working with a sports psychologist to help him separate the fighter from the husband, father, and worker outside of the octagon. Adding that to his regiment helped Wilson realize that fighting with less pressure, but giving it his all inside the octagon, would be enough.
With moral victories leading to the biggest win of his career, Wilson will remember a lot about that day in the UFC APEX, most notably because of who was in attendance to see it happen.
“I mean, the win was so fantastic being able to see my wife, and the emotion that [she showed], because my wife doesn’t watch me fight,” Wilson said. “She doesn’t watch. She watched my very first amateur fight and then after that she was like, ‘I’m done. I don’t want to watch anymore.’ So she hadn’t watched me fight in over a decade, and for her to be there and watch was fantastic, and it was so cool.
“I remember right after I won … I look over and I see my wife and she’s like bawling, I see my parents crying and everything and I was like, ‘Yeah, this is cool, this is awesome.’ It is an image that’ll be etched in my brain forever.”
