Matt Serra explains how he ended up taking down drunk guy during International Fight Week

Just one night before he was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame last week, former UFC welterweight champion Matt Serra ended up restraining a troublesome drunk at a Casino in Las Vegas. See the video of this incident, which promptly went viral inside the MMA bubble, below.

Speaking on the UFC Unfiltered podcast on Monday, Serra explained how this incident occurred. Apparently, Serra acted after the man attempted to fight him — but only when he was sure there was no other choice.

“We’re eating at the cafe and this couple comes in that’s out of their mind drunk,” Serra said (transcribed by Jed Meshew for MMA Fighting). “She passed out the second she was in there. He left, came back, left, but the he started getting really, really nasty to the staff. Cursing, just totally drunk, loud, obnoxious, rude. Then he starts throwing stuff at the waiter as he’s walking by and yelling to the point where everybody is stopping and looking…

“I was almost out of there! I was almost in the clear. My waiter is bringing me the check and then he gets up and he goes after my waiter – just a drunk moron and he has his fists clinched. He was throwing s**t at the other waiter, now he’s facing me and my family. So he’s drunk and something’s gonna happen. This guy is hitting him or he’s gonna throw something and my family is behind me, so I stood up and then he directed everything towards me the second I stood up. ‘You! I’ll fight you!’

“So he took his shirt off and the second he took his shirt off, I don’t know if he went to swing but I just neutralized that s**t. I stepped right in, got him around his waist – my wife, she goes, ‘When you went in I thought that you were gonna slam him. You let him down so gently!’ Dude, he just, like, melted when I grabbed him. He folded to jelly. so I got him around the waist, basic takedown. I gave him a free jiu-jitsu lesson.

“I put him on the ground, I mounted him. His mount defense, his elbow escape and his trap and roll were not there. So then the second I got him down I told my sister to film this. So you got it from there and you saw the rest.”

In the end, Matt Serra said he has no regrets about restraining this buffoon — although he’s glad he didn’t have to do anything more. Things could have gotten much earlier if he had.

“I took him down, I got a bigger applause then I did in my first GSP fight,” Serra laughed. “The audience erupted. They were still clapping by the time my sister started filming because that dude was as obnoxious as you can get. Yelling, screaming, making a scene, being vulgar. Total f**king d**khead.

“Even though he deserves to get smacked or something, the loser goes to the hospital and the winner goes to jail. I know there was no winning in beating up this guy but he definitely needed to be subdued because he was gonna hit somebody.”

What do you think of Matt Serra’s choice to take care of this drunk?

This article first appeared on BJPenn.com on 7/9/2018.