Back when Glover Teixeira was the UFC’s light heavyweight champion, you would see him carrying on in the western parts of Connecticut. He had his gym in Bethel, right across from Michael’s Tap Room, and was a regular fixture at the Farmhouse, a restaurant in Newtown where he could be found with a couple of glasses of wine and a steak on a random Thursday, talking to the locals about what it was like to be a UFC champion in his forties. He’d moved to the area in the aughts after an incredible journey from Brazil, which is the subject of a forthcoming book he penned with the journalist Guilherme Cruz, and it was here that he met his wife Ingrid.
He stayed. And people in these parts prize him in the way that Orange, New Jersey prized Tony Galento, the heavyweight boxer whose 1939 knockdown of Joe Louis became the lore and legend that fueled his locally famous lushing crib, Tony’s Tavern. When Glover beat Jan Blachowicz at UFC 267 to win the title at 41 years old, the city of Danbury held a parade in his honor, and the toasts haven’t slowed down yet.
That’s because Glover, now 45 and retired from competition, is a coach to the most celebrated fighter on the UFC’s roster, Alex Pereira. The current light heavyweight champion. If Glover was the Galento of Danbury, then “Poatan” is the Chupacabra. There are sightings of Pereira everywhere. My son and a group of his friends saw him in his Range Rover, giving a subtle head nod to assure them their eyes weren’t playing tricks. One friend swears he saw him at the food court at the Danbury Fair Mall, wearing a cowboy hat and boots. He has been spotted at many restaurants, the holes-in-the-wall to the Brazilian steakhouse in town, and everyone gives versions of the same thing when reporting back on their encounter: “That dude is a killer.”
Though I’d seen him at the gym plenty, on Halloween in 2023, less than two weeks before he’d win the light heavyweight title against Jiri Prochazka at UFC 295 at Madison Square Garden, I caught a glimpse of this myself. While having a beer at Michael’s Tap Room to let the legions of trick-or-treaters on Main Street thin out, in walked two strangers in full costume. I don’t want to say the record skipped because that would be an exaggeration (as far as I know, they don’t even have a record player), but everyone’s attention went to the front door and the barroom chatter died down for a split second there. Each stood well over 6-foot tall. One was dressed in a full-body shark outfit, the nose of the shark pointing straight to the heavens. The other, who was being held on a chain by the shark, was a deranged clown with black stars for eyes. They stopped and surveyed the room, before the shark led the clown to the shadowy edge of the bar.
ADVERTISEMENT
Advertisement
It was from there that, moments later, a high-pitched voice yelled out, “Chuck!”
Then I looked closer at the shark. It Glover Teixeira. And the clown, who peeled off his mask? None other than Alex Pereira. Glover was having a beer. Pereira, who doesn’t drink, was a dozen days away from winning a title in a second weight class and becoming the greatest bogeyman the state of Connecticut had ever known. I made a joke that he should put the mask back on before he scares off all these people, but the visual that night was telling the truth.
It was Glover who brought in the monster.
Pereira defends his light heavyweight title against Magomed Ankalaev at UFC 313 on Saturday night, which is his fourth title defense. In 2024, he was — in the eyes of many — the Fighter of the Year. When the UFC needed a star to celebrate its benchmark pay-per-view, UFC 300, Pereira stepped into the main event and knocked out Jamahal Hill. When Conor McGregor had to drop out of his scheduled return at UFC 303 due to a broken toe, there was Pereira, nursing a broken toe of his own, donning the cape to shut down Prochazka in the rematch. His fourth-round knockout of the headhunting Khalil Rountree at UFC 307 last October was a cherry on top, and was seen as one of the best fights of 2024.
ADVERTISEMENT
Advertisement
Three title defenses in one year. All leading to Ankalaev, the Dagestan fighter on a 13-fight unbeaten streak who is tailor-made to beat a sniping, kickboxing specialist like Pereira. Or so they say.
“They’ve been saying that guys are going to give him trouble since his very first UFC fight,” the champ’s longtime friend and fellow coach Plinio Cruz told me after a training session at Teixeira’s last week. Cruz has known Pereira since 2015. He has traveled the world with him and translated Pereira’s words to English-speaking media since before his UFC run, back to when he was competing in GLORY Kickboxing.
“Three years in the UFC, think about how many times we’ve been wrestled,” he says. “We didn’t put a black belt around his waist for nothing.”
Pereira came to Teixeira’s to help Glover prepare for a fight with Thiago Santos back in the fall of 2020. It was Teixeira’s longtime friend Jorge Guimaraes who brought them together, the man behind Black House in Los Angeles when Anderson Silva still ruled the ranks. If you didn’t follow kickboxing, it’s likely you didn’t know who Pereira was back then. The only thing anybody knew in 2020 was that he fought and beat then-UFC middleweight champion Israel Adesanya twice in a kickboxing ring, yet Pereira was still a couple of months out from beating Thomas Powell in the LFA, in what was his official segue into MMA.
“It was friendship right away,” Glover says of meeting Pereira. “He comes over to my house, and I was laying down in a hammock. I have a garden, and I had told Jorge, ‘You know how I am, I don’t want one of those guys who’s too fancy, go into restaurants saying, no, no, this restaurant is not good enough for me.’ I told him, ‘You know me, I’m simple.’ Then Alex comes, and he’s immediately inside my garden, looking at the vegetables, eating green tomatoes, talking.”
ADVERTISEMENT
Advertisement
One imagines Ferdinand the Bull sniffing flowers.
“I said, let’s do a barbecue, you like barbecue? And he said, ‘I love it.’ So I started cutting some meat, I put some music on that nobody likes … Plinio likes it of course, but nobody else likes it. It was old Brazilian country music. Old-school country, the kind my father likes. And I hear Alex say, ‘Oh man, that one’s good!’ He likes my music? Right away I knew, ‘I like this guy.’”
From there, Alex has become part of the family. You’ve seen the videos. Glover and Alex barbecuing. Glover and Alex wrestling in the snowbanks of the cruel northeast. Glover and Alex grappling in a river. Glover and Alex trying to teach Nina Drama jiu-jitsu. Glover and Alex doing Power Slap. It’s a comedy duo who’ve grown as thick as thieves over the past five years, with the only difference being that the script has flipped.
Now it’s Glover helping the champion Pereira, who has helped turn Teixeira’s gym into a destination of sorts.
Three years in the UFC, think about how many times we’ve been wrestled. We didn’t put a black belt around his waist for nothing.Plinio Cruz on Alex Pereira
ADVERTISEMENT
Advertisement
On the day I visited, the Tuesday before fight week, they were doing hard rounds with a rotation of killers giving Pereira different looks. There was Austin Ross, an ears-pinned-back wrestler who competed at the University of Delaware, pushing Pereira into the links. There was Yousri Belgaroui, a Dutch kickboxer of Moroccan descent, who faced off with Pereira twice in GLORY, sharpening his range. There was Plinio, standing in when demonstrations are needed, being used as a tackling dummy. There was Julian “JuJu” Reza, a longtime Teixeira staple who is turning pro this year, doing everything in his power to take Pereira down.
Glover watches it all while drinking his Stew Leonard’s coffee, a coffee that he’s snobbish about. At one point, as he works with Pereira to the thump of Meek Mill, he observes that something doesn’t smell right. He goes around the cage sniffing armpits, trying to identify the culprit. He returns to Alex many times, but Alex swears it’s not him. Such is the camaraderie at Teixeira’s, where the motto is, “The pain of discipline is better than the pain of regret.”
“I knew he was going to be great at fighting, because he’s a different beast, he’s a different breed,” Glover says. “I thought I was a different breed, but no, I’m a regular a dude that works hard. When I see Alex, we’re talking about a different human being. He knows that. There are things that we see where we go, ‘How the f*** is this guy coming over here and doing five rounds after training?’”
At the end of the training session, Glover gives an impassioned speech to the sweaty lot of pros, which includes Alex’s sister, Aline, who is a pro fighter too. With so many Brazilians in the room, he warns them that what he’s about to say might be offensive. He says he hates the jiu-jitsu mentality. He then mimics a complaining voice, saying, “Oh, my finger hurts!” waving his index finger in the air. “No, I love the wrestler’s mentality,” he says. A guy could have a massive head wound and he’d wrap it up with a bandage and want to go back in there. He says that a wrestler never quits. That he keeps coming and gives it his all. The kind of mentality that screams you’re going to have to kill me.
Perhaps this is by design, given that Ankalaev — by birthright — has a wrestler’s mentality. He is from Dagestan, after all. But then again, maybe not. Glover is the living example of hard work and perseverance paying off. The stalwart who’s been through it all. It’s a far different Teixeira in 2025 from the one in his fighting days who didn’t say much of anything, at least not in his second language of English. A decade ago, at UFC 172 in Baltimore, Glover stood in there against the biggest star in the sport at the time, Jon Jones, as the most pedestrian of B-sides.
ADVERTISEMENT
Advertisement
Now he is coaching the biggest star in the UFC. And he speaks in parables.
“If I could give you a million dollars, you’d be happy,” he says to Alex specifically after training. “If I give you $10 million, you’d be happy. But if I gave you $100 million, yet [with the stipulation that] you don’t wake up tomorrow, which do you choose?”
The white teeth that Glover likes to flash across his five o’clock shadow show up as he smiles for the answer. The eyebrows bob like cartoon apostrophes.
“You always want to wake up tomorrow, right! It’s more valuable to be alive.”
Because I don’t speak Portuguese, I have no real idea as to why Glover told him this, but when it was relayed to me I gathered that it had something to do with living in the moment. What gives Glover extreme confidence in Pereira, whether it’s against Ankalaev or Jones or Oleksandr Usyk — boxing’s current heavyweight champ who has said he’d love to fight Poatan before it’s all said and done — is that Pereira works harder than everyone else.
ADVERTISEMENT
Advertisement
“People talk about all the stuff that he does,” Glover says after “Poatan” leaves for the day. “He was in Australia last week, and he comes home on Monday, and on Tuesday he wants to spar. I said, ‘Let’s do three rounds today,’ and he says, ‘No, let’s do five.’ He beat everyone in the room. No jet lag for him. I’m telling you, he is a different breed.”
It’s been a rags to riches story.
When Pereira first came to Connecticut in 2020, he lived with Glover the first few months before sharing a place with a group of teammates. A father of two sons with his ex-wife, at the time aged 9 and 10, he drove an old Toyota Camry. Then things started to happen. The Sean Strickland knockout was a loud one. Then the Adesanya fights played out, the winning and losing of the UFC middleweight title. Then came the move up to 205 pounds, which has skyrocketed his status in MMA as a kind of rock star. Now he lives in his own house in Danbury, in which he keeps an assortment of super cars — a blue $275,000 Lamborghini Huracan Performante, a white Corvette and a Range Rover among his favorites. Everything around him grows, from the produce in Glover’s garden to the size of the Teixeira gym. They have purchased the property next door to the existing building and will be expanding this summer.
ADVERTISEMENT
Advertisement
And the wealth has spread beyond Danbury.
Plinio Cruz recently opened up his own gym in Nutley, New Jersey, a suburb of Newark where Cruz at one time trained with Charles Oliveira. And the day after the training session at Teixeira’s, Pereira made the drive out to New Jersey to train with the cast over there. With a roll-up garage door in the front, Cruz MMA is in part a shrine to “Poatan.” There are pieces of art dedicated to him, and a mega UFC 307 banner with Pereira and Rountree, along with a row of championship belts and a poster of Cruz wearing the CFFC belt back when he competed as a heavyweight. There’s also a flat screen up front playing Muhammad Ali vs. Joe Frazier on a loop.
Among those assembled in New Jersey are Dillon Danis, who is training for his upcoming boxing match against KSI, and the New York rapper Action Bronson, a fight fan enthusiast who finds training in MMA “helps with the mental health.” It’s a true New York gathering.
The sight of Danis, Bronson, Cruz and Pereira standing together is one of the oddest you’ll ever see, but Pereira doesn’t distinguish. He goes through the course of rotating sparring partners, including Danis.
ADVERTISEMENT
Advertisement
I ask Action Bronson if he has stood in with Pereira before.
“Not yet,” he says, wrapping his hands.
After a few rotations of sparring partners, Cruz comes over to Bronson, who is taking a breather on the side. “Action, you’re in,” he tells him. And for the first time in Bronson’s life, as he walks toward a waiting Pereira, he puts in a mouthguard. He isn’t stupid. The rapper who loves MMA as much as he does his New York Knicks, circles the UFC’s light heavyweight champ, who is upright in an orthodox stance, locked in. Pereira stalks forward with sense of a predator, tossing out the left jab, while Bronson does his best to land some shots.
He also takes his share.
“He hit me with that little swipe to the gut that had me keel over,” he says when he comes back over, holding his stomach. He is breathing hard and sweating it out. “Getting hit with one of his shots is like getting hit by 10 people at once,” he says.
ADVERTISEMENT
Advertisement
“We threw you to the wolves,” Plinio tells him, laughing. But there is a kind of warrior’s code even in this kind of thing. You stand in with the champ, you’ve earned something. It’s a nod to belonging. Pereira will hit any target put in front of him, without discerning. Whenever a media type asks him to kick them as hard as he can, he happily obliges. His power isn’t reserved for contenders. It’s for anybody who wants it.
The one thing he won’t do? In this case, talk about it. Staying focused on the job at hand, he is in no mood to do interviews the week before he’ll be forced to do his media obligations in Vegas. (I was there mostly to observe, anyway, but when I asked him if he’d like to speak for this piece, he said very politely, “Sábado,” the Portuguese for “Saturday.” I knew he was flying to Las Vegas on Saturday, meaning the one word he offered me for this piece told me everything I needed to know.)
Why?
Getting hit with one of his shots is like getting hit by 10 people at once.Action Bronson on Alex Pereira
It’s because he had a feature coming out in the Player’s Tribune, in which he covers a lot of ground. In the piece, he very candidly — and poetically — talks about how he came to be a fighter in his own words. He covers growing up in São Barnardo, and being afraid of the dark as a kid, which he only later understood to mean being afraid of those things outside his control. It’s that fear that led him to becoming a great fighter. He talks about taking a job at a tire shop at 12 years old to help ease the burden off his parents, who were raising eight kids. About how that job led to drinking at an early age, at first some Cachaça at a nearby bar, then whatever was being poured by age 16. The slow squandering of his youth to alcohol and day-to-day anonymity, going nowhere.
It was a scrap with a local butcher on the soccer pitch that turned him toward fighting. He didn’t stop drinking until he was 26, and the reason he did was that he could never control it. It was fighting that gave him back a sense of control, or at least where he could keep it. One of the most terrifying strikers the UFC has ever known was born of fear. As he says in the piece, which is an incredible read and well worth the time, “I am afraid of getting hit. Of being hurt during a fight. And I believe that it helps me to have that fear. That fear, it is my friend.”
He is very afraid of a wrestling-minded, bomb-throwing Russian like Ankalaev, if you want to know the truth. But it’s what he does when he’s afraid that makes him the terror of the division.
The Easter Island thing is legit. The expressionless face has translated far better than any words can when you’re a two-division champion who obliterates everything he touches. I think Cruz is onto something when he says Alex “Poatan” Pereira speaks loudest when not saying anything at all.
“I knew he was able to achieve great things, but over time we knew he was able to conquer anything,” he says. “Like Glover has said, he’s the full package, and I think even the fact that people criticize the no English thing — I don’t want him to speak English! I think the way he keeps that stone face creates a whole mystique around him that people like, and now with his sarcasm behind the jokes … because he doesn’t speak English, I think people can just relate to him as a simple guy.”
A simple guy who shows up to the ceremonial weigh-ins in full native face paint and Pataxó headdress in homage to his indigenous roots. Who does a war strut as he makes his way to the Octagon, stopping to fire an imaginary arrow in the direction of his opponent before letting out a blood-curdling scream, bringing everyone in on the ritual.
“I compare him to Chuck Liddell,” Glover says, referring to his own mentor from back in the day at The Pit. “Just the lifestyle and the way people respond to him.”
Alex Pereira came to Connecticut to help a champion and ended up becoming one of the most beloved champions of the era. Little Danbury has no idea what it did to become a portal for Brazilian champions, but so long as Pereira stays in control, business will boom, and the local haunts will stay haunted.
