Joseph Larcinese: ‘Expect Someone Hunting for a Finish’

Back in January, with the MMA leader in Sydney for UFC 325, Australia’s top promotion, Eternal MMA, held an event the night before at Royal Randwick Racecourse featuring a trio of title fights and some of the top emerging names in the company. The first of those championship bouts came at flyweight, where Dana White’s Contender Series alum Anthony Drilich faced off with unbeaten prospect Joseph Larcinese.

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Late in the third round, Larcinese scored a stoppage win, elevating his record to 5-0 and giving himself the chance to make a direct plea to UFC COO Hunter Campbell who watched his exploits from the other side of the cage. The Australian prospect told the onlooking executive that what he saw was what he could expect every time out —someone that is coming to fight and chase down finishes.

“Afterwards, I just felt that performance, me being me and not trying to be anything special, I just felt, ‘That has to be something,’” Larcinese said. “After a week or two, we had a little hint —they throw you a little bone and you’re like, ‘This might be it; I might have done enough.’ But then it was straight in the gym getting ready for Macau —it turned out to be Macau and Road to UFC.”

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Larcinese is set to compete on Friday in the opening round of the Season 5 flyweight tournament, where he’s matched up with Japanese hopeful Ryoga Arimoto. One of two undefeated fighters in the bracket and the least experienced of the lot, the promising 27-year-old looks at the opportunity to take part in the tournament format as a welcomed chance to truly prove he belongs and log some additional learning time inside the Octagon.

“I’m more looking at it as three fights and then the UFC is stuck with me for a while,” he said. “I got thinking about it and at first, I was like, ‘Uh — three fights to get into the UFC,’ but then we sat down and were like, ‘This is what I need with my experience right now’ because I’ve only been doing MMA for four years.

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“I kind of welcome the challenge of three fights in a year, do you know what I mean?” he added. “A lot of guys with Contender Series, you just go out there, put on a show, get a contract straight away. With this, I’ve really got to earn my way into the UFC and once I get there, I’ll be ready.”

Fighting is complicated mental exercise that requires a fighter to walk a fine line between confidence and delusion; they need to feel like they’re capable of beating anyone at any time, while simultaneously knowing that anything can happen on any given night and pretty much no one escapes this sport without catching a loss. Various elements contribute to making that self-assuredness inch right up against that line of delusion, but not cross it are seeing others from your gym, others from the promotion where you compete have success and move on to bigger and better things.

Larcinese has experienced both, as he’s trained alongside former UFC featherweight Josh Culibao for his entire career and witnessed several previous Eternal MMA champions graduate to the UFC and continue to have tremendous success.

“Before we even started training, me and my brother looked at Eternal and were like, ‘I would be so cool one day just to get on Eternal,’” recalled Larcinese. “Now it’s like you said: now that I’m on it, you see all the guys that become champions are quite successful in the UFC, so it’s like, ‘Okay, we are doing something right here.’”

The list of names to pass through the promotion and make their way to the Octagon are numerous, but include former welterweight champ Jack Della Maddalena, ascending lightweight Quillan Salkilld, Casey O’Neill, Steve Erceg, Tom Nolan and many others.

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“Eternal, the way they run their promotion, it’s like ‘this is what UFC is like’ and it feeds you the right experience: the feelings, the interviews, the spotlight. It’s been really good.

“The first two years of training, me and my brother would just watch everything Josh does, and as long as we can do everything he’s doing in terms of the amount of training, the intensity, we’ll be going in the right direction,” he added in regard to Culibao. “Then it was ‘we’ve got to try to do more than him all the time’ and that’s the biggest help because if you’re the best guy in the room, unless you’re constantly studying other people, you’ll never know what it takes to get to that level. All I had to do was watch him every session and just download.”

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That approach and his efforts inside the cage have thus far paid off and carried Larcinese into position to try and chase down his dreams.

Having won nine straight fights overall and sporting a 100-percent finishing rate as a professional, “Big Sexy” intends to bring more of his signature style with him to Macau this weekend and eventually into the UFC flyweight division.

“I think you can expect — don’t get my nickname twisted; I’m a very different fighter to what the name makes it sound like,” laughed Larcinese, who was jokingly given the nickname several years ago before one of his amateur bouts, only for it to stick. “Expect aggression, expect an actual fight, expect someone that is hunting for a finish.

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“It’s not about winning rounds, points; it’s about breaking the opponent and hunting for a finish,” he added. “That’s what everyone should expect when they see my name on the card.”

That’s what he showed in January, that’s what he promised Hunter Campbell in his post-fight interview, and there is no reason to expect any different on Friday when he begins his journey down the Road to UFC.