Mackenzie Dern is about ready to catch a break. What better than the equivalent of a home game?
Dern took her 4-year-old daughter to Disney on Ice at Honda Center in Anaheim in late 2023, then found herself back at the Anaheim arena being celebrated at a Ducks game in early February.
Roughly two weeks later, the UFC strawweight will return for a third time, only this time to fight.
“I was already there feeling it and I was already visualizing it. ‘Man, I’m gonna walk out here. My name is gonna be up there,’” said the Huntington Beach resident, who hasn’t had such an advantageous setting since her pre-UFC days in LFA in 2017 when she lived in Phoenix. “It’s so cool to be able to kind of fight at home.”
After going through a divorce in 2022 and having it become public with back-and-forth allegations of domestic abuse in 2023, Dern had her sixth year in the UFC end with the first knockout loss of her career.
Now Dern is seizing the opportunity to jump back into the Octagon, fighting on short notice for the first time when she faces Amanda Lemos in the featured prelims bout at UFC 298 at Honda Center.
The Brazilian jiu-jitsu sensation said it took her about five days to accept the UFC’s offer to replace an injured Tatiana Suarez. She sees it as a win-win situation by doing the UFC a favor with a chance to move back into title contention.
Lemos, 36, hasn’t fought in 18 months since suffering a lopsided unanimous-decision loss to 115-pound champion Weili Zhang. In that UFC 292 title fight, Zhang took down Lemos in all five rounds and landed 296 total strikes to the challenger’s 36.
“I know that if she’s anything like me, she’s gonna come and … try and make up her mistakes from her last loss that she had against Weili, which in my opinion she lost a lot on the ground and the grappling part, so that’s a big opening for me,” Dern, 30, said. “I feel like we both have the chance to see who can correct the most from her last…
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