Sam Alvey’s time in the UFC may have come to an end, but that doesn’t mean the 36-year-old is hanging up his gloves for good.
Following his loss at UFC Vegas 59 and subsequent UFC release, Alvey appeared on Wednesday’s episode of The MMA Hour to give an update on his career and future plans. Speaking through a broken jaw, Alvey made it clear that he intends to keep competing for the foreseeable future — and there’s one opponent in particular that piques his interest.
“Every MMA fighter wants it, but now it kind of makes sense — is the Jake Paul fight,” Alvey said Wednesday on The MMA Hour. “Everybody wants to do it. I like to joke that I haven’t won in a while, which is the kind of guys he likes to fight, so that makes sense. I’m the same size as him, which will be a little different for him — he tends to like fighting people that are smaller than him, so he’ll have to make a little exception for that. But I’m the first guy that he would have fought that is a knockout guy. I am a guy that has always been a striker, and I would be the first non-wrestler. I’m not quite a boxer. I’ve never boxed. I’ve kickboxed, 7-1 professional kickboxing, but I’ve never boxed. But I am a striker. So it might be the way he sees himself fighting next. I think it makes sense. There’s a chance.
“We’re reaching out to [Showtime], we’re seeing what happens.”
Alvey (33-18-1, 1 NC) suffered a first-round TKO loss to Michal Oleksiejczuk this past Saturday in what ultimately served as his final appearance of a 24-fight UFC run. The setback pushed Alvey’s current winless streak to 10 straight bouts and gave him the unfortunate distinction of owning the longest winless streak in UFC history — a record he took from UFC Hall of Famer and former two-division champion B.J. Penn, who had a similar nine-fight run.
But ever the eternal optimist, Alvey looked back fondly on his time in the promotion. He emphasized that his own personal history with the Paul brothers is a motivating factor in wanting to be the latest ex-UFC fighter to try their hand against Paul in the boxing ring.
“A fun story — before their first fight, they invited me to come out and help them train, so I helped spar with Logan Paul,” Alvey said. “This would’ve been five years ago, six years ago, something like that. I ended up meeting with their boxing coach, standing in line for an MMA junkie award or something. And his boxing trainer and I, we split messages and they brought me out to help them train for a day, so I got to spar with Logan Paul. And it was a lot of fun. Logan seemed like a good dude. I wasn’t crazy about Jake.
“He was a douche. He was. I’m smiling Sam, I’m not supposed to be saying that — he was, he was a douche. Logan seemed OK. Logan, I actually almost broke his jaw in the sparring session. I was doing the best I could to carry him, to just be a training partner for him, throw some. And he just kept getting hit. And at one point he kind of fell back, ‘I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!’ But I was supposed to spar his brother too, Jake. Jake wouldn’t do it afterward. I said, ‘Jake, I’ll take it easy, I’ll give you whatever work you want.’ But Jake wouldn’t spar me that day. And then I was never invited back.”
Alvey isn’t the first MMA fighter to express a dislike of Jake Paul. And he went on to elaborate about what exactly rubbed him the wrong way about the popular YouTuber turned boxing star during their brief interactions.
“Some of the stuff he was doing with the girls that were at our boxing day, it was bad,” Alvey said. “That bothered me. It was nothing terrible. It was just, yeah, he was doing stuff I was present for, and it’s like, they were fine with it but I wasn’t. So that was kind of my big problem for the day. But his fighter pay thing — and people hate me for this because I think fighter pay is pretty good and I defend it fairly well — he goes after fighter pay, but he doesn’t do it because he believes anything. He does it because it’s an easy win, it’s an easy way to get people on his side.
“If the UFC were to do what he wants them to do, as far as fighter pay goes — everyone gets paid a million dollars or $10 million or whatever it is he’s saying — he would just get most of the roster of the UFC fired. If the UFC were to increase their pay to what Jake Paul wants them to do, the UFC wouldn’t be able to have the same business model they do. Instead of having 800 fighters on the roster, they would drop it down to 100. Those 100 would get paid very, very well, but they wouldn’t get advertised for as much, they wouldn’t be given as much stuff, and the rest of the roster would be fired, would be sent out to wherever else they could find fights.”
Alvey’s goals aren’t limited to the boxing ring, however.
The 14-year veteran said that his ultimate dream has always been to be a professional wrestler. He grew up religiously watching the WWE, and said that — to this day — professional wrestling is the one side street that could get him to retire on the spot.
It’s a dream he plans to pursue now that he’s no longer under UFC employment.
“I wasn’t allowed to because I was under contract,” Alvey said. “Because I can’t be talking about other contracts. Now that I’m out of contract, well, I’m going to let my jaw heal, and then I’m going to start [working toward it]. But no, absolutely — as much as I’d like to fight Jake Paul, I would much rather wrestle Logan Paul.
“Why not [do both]? I could do them in the same night. I’ll pin one — 1, 2, 3 — then I’ll knock the other one out.”
