Vanessa Demopoulos’ Saturday night went exactly as planned — she got a win, a bonus, and hoisted in the air by Joe Rogan in the post-fight interview.
Demopoulos made her second octagon appearance count with a slick submission win over Silvana Gomez Juarez during the preliminary card at UFC 270 in Anaheim this past weekend. The 33-year-old was dropped hard by a Juarez right hand and was in big trouble — even admitting she didn’t remember several seconds between the punch and recovery — before working towards an armbar that forced the tap in the first round.
After the win, Demopoulos got her post-fight interview with Rogan and fell into the UFC color commentator’s arms, which is just the way she drew it up.
“I do so much positive self talk and I thought, ‘Joe Rogan’s gonna interview me, this is gonna be my moment,’” Demopoulos told MMA Fighting. “I’m just gonna put my arm around him, put one leg up, the other leg up, and he’s just gonna hoist me up. That’s what’s going to happen, and it was so flawless. It happened exactly the way I thought in my head over and over again. I was like, ‘Let’s go!’. It was so freaking cool that he went along with it. What a cool guy.
“I first thought about that when I knew I was going to be on a PPV card. I had so many new experiences in one week’s time. It went from fighting in the APEX to fighting in front of a crowd, so my walkout song has more intensity to it, I get to look around, and I got to see faces that I recognized because I envisioned that, and I envisioned Joe Rogan coming up to me and interviewing me, and I kept manifesting the performance bonus.
“I had all of this written everywhere. I have videos where I wrote it on whiteboards, book markers, I had it on the cover of my phone, it was everywhere. But everything played out so much cooler when I lived it over my imagination. F*ck, it was so cool, man!”
Demopoulos picked up her first octagon victory after dropping a unanimous decision to JJ Aldrich at August’s UFC Vegas 35 event. The former LFA strawweight champion got her UFC opportunity after coming up short on Dana White’s Contender Series in August 2020, losing a unanimous decision to contract winner Cory McKenna. She would go on to lose her title to now fellow UFC fighter Loopy Godinez at LFA 94 two months later.
So to get her first UFC win after everything she’s gone through to get to that point was a surreal moment.
“Oh my God! I got up, looked over to see my coaches, I run over to the cage and I’m too short to really give them a hug so I jumped on top of the cage,” Demopoulos said. “I jumped off and there was a commissioner. I gave him a hug, too — I don’t even know that guy.
“I was so beyond the moment it was so freaking cool. So cool.”
Currently, Demopoulos is smelling the roses and enjoying a memorable win that has seen her social media following jump up tremendously.
While this past Saturday night has netted her a lot of attention and new fans, Demopoulos is not ready to rest on her laurels in any way as she is laser focused on an active year inside the octagon.
“I definitely want to fight a solid four times this year. The who, I haven’t thought about it. The what, it’s gonna happen,” Demopoulos explained. “After a performance like that, they’re gonna want me back in there soon and and I want to get in there soon. I love training. I was gonna go out and compete in some jiu-jitsu tournaments — which I love doing — but MMA comes first, man.
“I’m just so pumped to fight. I want it. But that’s as far as I’ve gotten on that thought process, I want to fight four times this year, and it’s still January so we absolutely have that opportunity. I’m on a suspension, though. I got dropped. I woke up on the ground, so the commission came up to me, handed me a suspension and were like, ‘You can’t fight for a little while now.’”
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