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No 'if' for Amanda Cooper ahead of Mackenzie Dern: 'When I beat her, it's going to take me to the top'

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RIO DE JANEIRO – It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize why Amanda Cooper wanted the fight she’s got ahead of her on Saturday.

But as she prepares to meet unbeaten prospect Mackenzie Dern (6-0 MMA, 1-0 UFC) on Saturday’s pay-per-view main card of UFC 224 in Rio de Janeiro, Cooper (3-3 MMA, 2-2 UFC) doesn’t mind explaining her intentions with the 115-pound bout in no uncertain terms.

When I beat her, it’s going to take me to the top,” Cooper told MMAjunkie on Tuesday. “Being a 6-0 rising star, all the people that are behind her, all the people that want to believe in this crazy Mackenzie Dern hype, they’re going to be fans of me. And if they’re not going to be fans of me, they’re going to be watching me because I’m the girl that beat her.

“That’s why I wanted that fight. It’s not a win-win for me. ‘Oh, if you lose, it’s just Mackenzie Dern.’ That’s not in my head. I’m going to win this fight, and it’s going to bring me to the top. And that’s where I need to go. I need to beat high-level people to get to high-level fights, and that’s going to progress me a lot faster.”

This will take a few things, of course. Not only will Cooper have to be the first woman to beat the grappling star since she started her MMA run, which includes an Invicta FC outing and her octagon debut in March, she’ll have to do it in enemy territory. While Dern was born in Phoenix and is now training in California, she’s got strong ties to Rio, where she can usually be found between camps.

Cooper, who comes into the bout off a knockout win over Angela Magana, is well aware of her spoiler role here, but she’s fine with it. When it comes the crowd at Rio’s Jeunesse Arena, she knows that it is not exactly going to be a friendly one on Saturday. But having repeatedly visualized the moment to keep from being affected by it, she’s prepared to channel whatever energy – good and bad – in her favor.

And, at the end of the day, there’s something to be said for being the one who’s laying low.

“The UFC is trying to build her up,” Cooper said. “She’s fighting every two months, and they’re definitely trying to build her up and make her this star. So there’s got to be pressure. I’m sure some people perform better under pressure; some people don’t. I don’t know how she is because it just feels like she’s fighting too soon, too much, too often, and now she’s got a fight in her home town.

“And putting on a show – I’ve seen interviews, and she’s like, ‘I’ve got to get a submission for the Brazilian fans.’ And that’s just – I wouldn’t want to go out there like that. I would just want to go out there and perform at the best of my ability. And that’s what I’m going to do.”

Cooper is right in that Dern has been quite clear about her intentions of turning “ABC” into the fourth submission victim of her MMA career. But it’s not like Cooper needed to hear that type of plan from her opponent’s mouth, anyway.

“My losses are to submission, so it makes sense; she’s a jiu-jitsu girl,” Cooper said. “She wants to take me down. I’ve got awesome standup and awesome wrestling. I don’t think she would want it any other way. It wasn’t shocking, like, ‘Duh, that makes sense. It would be dumb if you didn’t want that.’ I knew she would plan for that, and obviously, it’s an easy thing to train.”

Cooper has her criticism of Dern’s game, which we’ll get to shortly, but she won’t go so far as to discredit the ground game of a multiple-time jiu-jitsu champion. On her end, Cooper is realistic in that she’s not going to be able to fill every gap in that area in the few weeks she had to prepare for Dern.

But what she could do was focus on her strengths. So she focused on not getting taken own, on getting out of bad positions and on being aggressive with her ground and pound. She also focused on her striking, which encompassed, in light of Dern’s heavy-throwing on the stand-up, on going backward on strikes and cutting angles.

“I’m a striker,” Cooper said. “I love punching. I love getting people away from me and punching them. It’s something I’ve been doing my whole career, so it’s not just these two months, but definitely heavily this fight camp. That’s what I’ve been working on.”

Dern’s MMA beginnings were already under the spotlight, which means many of her possible opponents have been able to follow her from the start. And as a person who fits into that category, Cooper definitely sees herself with an advantage there.

“She doesn’t know who I am; she thinks I’m a boxer,” Cooper said. “And yeah, I did start with boxing, but that’s not who I am.”

Cooper, in turn, not only knows who Dern is, but hasn’t seen much change in her style and in her striking throughout her fights. And while she’ll concede that it’s admirable that Dern has been willing to branch out of her comfort zone, she’s not too impressed by them.

“Just the same, predictable strikes – throwing really hard,” Cooper said. “And that, to me, shows, from all the years of striking, all the years of people I’ve met, all the fights I’ve seen, the really hard, aggressive, is the lack of knowledge in this sport. Like, she doesn’t know what she’s doing striking. She thinks, ‘I’m going to throw this big punch, and then I’m going to set up a takedown.’ I’ve just been doing it too long. It just seems so easy and so predictable.

“She’s got a tiny bit of judo, not great wrestling and great jiu-jitsu. I’m not going to take that away from her. She definitely does well with it. I’ve seen some of the fights she’s had where I didn’t think she’s done as well as she should have. I give her props for trying to stand up as much as she has, because I’ve seen her in interviews before say that she’s supposed to dominate on the ground, so she’s trying to work her stand-up and get better. A lot of people wouldn’t test themselves like that, but it just shows an opponent that has a lot of holes for me.”

Cooper is big into visualizing. Like she said, she visualizing the roaring, hostile crowd as she walks into the arena. But if all of her visualizations are correct, we might be looking into a somewhat quiet one by the time the fight ends.

“I visualize every part of the fight,” Cooper said. “I visualize being in bad positions and getting out of them. I visualize me knocking her out. I visualize me breaking her nose. … In my visualization, I finish her in the second round.”

For more on UFC 224, check out the UFC Rumors section of the site.

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