The Resilience Of Alexander Hernandez

“It’s not that I'm not confident and not that I don't have a certain degree of pride - people should - but I definitely don't have the same degree of ego or even an awareness,” he explains. “Again, you're driving your head forward in a tunnel because you have tunnel vision. But the more mature you get and the more you can grow, the bigger that vision grows, the bigger your scope and the bigger your horizon. You see the picture for what it is. It's like, man, stop running your head so hard into that single little wall. You could probably go around it.”

He laughs the laugh of a man who probably needed a helmet for all those runs into that wall. But those days are over. 

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“This is something fun,” Hernandez continues. “Stop taking this so seriously. You're making this a bigger deal than it needs to be. There's other things going on. Fighting’s not a big deal to a lot of people; you're not important. So if you're going to do it, do it for better reasons. And so that's where I've been at. Why am I doing it? I want to. I really want to show out and I really want to impress myself and I really want to do dope s**t.”

Those are good enough reasons for anyone to fight professionally, especially since Hernandez, a former mortgage loan officer, doesn’t need to. But the fact that he still wants to ride that prizefighting rollercoaster makes him a dangerous man as he looks to follow up a split decision win over Austin Hubbard last October with something a little more aesthetically pleasing to himself.

“My last one, I just got by and I feel like I've been getting by for the last couple of years and I'm not really proud or impressed by that,” he said. “And so, I would like to do something that is an expression of my skill and perspective. Wouldn't it be cool to fight and it be almost like an expression of art or poetry? That'd be f**king cool. And to really kind of glide through it and not just bite down and have to get it done, but to really show out and impress yourself? So that's really where I'm coming from. And if I don't do that, I don't really care to be doing it anymore. I'm really kind of taking it from that perspective that you guys wouldn't have to not sign me, I'll just walk away. I don't care to do it anymore if I'm not doing it to the level I would like to see myself doing it at.”

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Bold words. And honest ones. And just like Hernandez never lost his smile, he never lost his honesty, either.  But while you may wonder if all this is putting added pressure on him to perform on Saturday night, it’s not.

“I don't feel like I've got a burden on my back,” he said. “I feel like I'm really enjoying it. I'm enjoying this camp, I feel really good and we're having fun as a team. I feel really confident and secure in myself. I guess that confidence and security is what lightens the load and just lets me know it's going to be all right, no matter what. And I really think I can do some pretty fun, impressive stuff on this guy. He's a good fight for that.”

And if things don’t go as planned, Alexander Hernandez isn’t too concerned. He’s got a Plan B.

“Dude, I'm a cockroach,” he laughs. “They keep trying to take me out, put me down and it’s due to my ability to believe that I just pull that shoe off of me and climb to the top of that refrigerator again and terrorize the house. I have a steel trap for a mind. It’s resilience and it's like short-term memory. I keep being able to convince myself that I am the best. I have an uncanny ability to forget and reconvince myself. And that has been one of my greatest resources.” 

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That, and his modesty. I tell him if he works on his confidence, he may have a future in this sport.

He laughs.

“This is most rational confidence I've ever had,” he said. “I've been irrationally confident a lot. Ignorantly confident a lot, but I am rationally confident right now. And that's a bad boy right there.”