Joey Two Times was born on an autumn night inside Pearl Theatre in Las Vegas, Nevada. The new #1 contender of the flyweight division takes you back to how the christening came to be (Transcript via MMA Fighting):
“This started a while back when I fought Alex Perez, just my coaches were calling me Joey Two Times because they had that weird stoppage where I had to stop him twice in the night, remember the ref jumped in,” So they’re like, ‘Joey Two Times they call you.’ And my wife’s Italian so she loved it and started calling me that.”
The name would build steam in Benavidez’s next bout at UFC Brooklyn and then once again this weekend at UFC Minneapolis:
“The next fight I fought Dustin Ortiz and I was like, ‘I already beat him once.’ And my coach was like, ‘That’s because you’re Two Times, you’ve got to beat him again.’ ‘Oh yeah, that’s true,’” Benavidez recalled. “Then Formiga came on and I was like, ‘Oh my God. And If I fight him, then I have to…’ It’s like a prophecy, in the future then I have to fight Cejudo. So it wasn’t necessarily to get the Cejudo thing, but we’re just trying to be goofy and creative like that.”
The culmination of the Joey Two Times moniker will be actualized once Benavidez adds another name to his ‘Two Time” résumé, the biggest fish of the flyweight and bantamweight divisions:
“It made sense, prophecy-wise, I guess, now it does too,” Benavidez said of the “Joey Two Times” Moniker. “The fact is the guy’s on top of the world, I beat him, why wouldn’t he want to come and avenge a loss?”
Do you believe Joey Two Times will strike again in a rematch with Henry Cejudo?
