Steve Erceg’s father was the person who first gave one of the best flyweight boxers in the world the motivation to never give up on mixed martial arts.
Erceg will look to get back into title contention when he faces Kai Kara-France in the co-main event of UFC 305 on Saturday in Perth, Australia. The Australian is looking to bounce back from losing his title in a hard-fought fight against Alexandre Pantoja, where he silenced doubters who thought he never deserved a title fight in the first place.
Erceg recently revealed that he nearly quit the sport soon after he began training. He first became interested in mixed martial arts after watching Frank Mir submit the obviously bigger Brock Lesnar at UFC 81 in 2008. The urge to find out how Mir did it led Erceg to Wilkie’s Martial Arts at the age of 14.
When Erceg began training with the aim of competing, he was joined by his father, Matthew Erceg, who also needed to lose weight. However, it was “Astro Boy” who first stopped coming to the gym. However, his father continued to train and brought home details of the training, which motivated Erceg to start training again.
UFC 305: du Plessis vs. Adesanya airs Saturday at 10pm ET on ESPN+. Order now! “I wanted to get into MMA for the competition,” Erceg said at UFC 305 Embedded. “I don’t think my dad knew about it from the beginning. He just wanted to cut weight at the time, so he decided to start at the same time that I started. And luckily for me, he kept me going, because I wasn’t really going to keep going, but he kept going. And he started coming home and talking about the chokes he was doing and the sparring and all the stuff I originally started doing. So that got me back into the sport, and I’ve been doing it ever since.”
When Erceg asked to compete for the first time after just two years of training, his father didn’t think he was tough enough. The future UFC fighter went through a bit of a backyard test with his dad, got in, and the rest is history.
Erceg is only four fights into his UFC tenure, but he has proven himself on the regional circuit, with his loss to Pantoja being his first defeat in 13 fights since 2018. Meanwhile, Kara-France is coming off back-to-back losses to former champion Brandon Moreno and top contender Amir Albazi.
