Johnny Walker became the first man to ever finish Waldo Cortes-Acosta in MMA on Saturday night, flooring him with a head kick and punches at the Meta APEX, and he’s down to another last-minute call to enter the octagon if the UFC needs a heavyweight at Madison Square Garden.
Walker and WAC stepped in on eight days’ notice to save the main event of UFC Vegas 124 on Nov. 7 after the cancellation of Sean Brady vs. Gabriel Bonfim, and the Brazilian now volunteers to serve as the backup fighter for Ciryl Gane vs. Josh Hokit, the heavyweight title bout that headlines UFC 334 on Nov. 12 in New York.
“It just showed my potential, right?” Walker told MMA Fighting of his win over Cortes-Acosta. “These are facts. I wasn’t 100 percent trained, but I was more or less in shape. It just showed that I’m ready for anything. If someone drops out of the title fight next week or gets injured, they can put me in there too [laughs].”
Walker, who lives in Las Vegas and trains at Porrada Training Center, is open to flying to New York for the assignment “if [the UFC] pays for my flight.”
“If they need someone to step in, I’m here,” Walker said. “I didn’t get hurt too badly, no. My face is just a little swollen because I ate a lot of punches, right? I got hit a lot and it got swollen, but I didn’t suffer any injuries.”
Gane will defend the heavyweight belt after knocking out Alex Pereira in June, the same night Hokit stopped Derrick Lewis to enter the title picture at UFC White House. Walker sees a good path to victory for Hokit if he uses his wrestling, with Gane on a different level when it comes to striking.
If the UFC 334 backup role doesn’t ultimately happen, Walker looks for a return to action in the first quarter of 2027 to win “one more fight and then [fight for] the belt.”
“If it’s for the title, I’ll do something crazy and fight [next week] anyway,” Walker said, “but ideally, I’d fight around February or March. Hokit could be an option, right? If Hokit loses, that would be a wonderful scenario for me, because I could already fight him.”
“I think he has good wrestling, but his jiu-jitsu probably isn’t that good,” he said of Hokit. “And his striking isn’t anything crazy either, so I think that would be an excellent fight for me. He’s also light, he’s not that big, so it would be a perfect fight for me. If he takes me down, I’ve got plenty of jiu-jitsu. I’d sweep him, I’d catch him on the ground. And if he wants to stand and trade, I’d knock him out too. It’d going to be a tough fight for him.”
Walker is confident in his future as a heavyweight following a 2-0 start in the division with a pair of knockouts and bonuses won. Top-ranked fighters like Sergei Pavlovich, Alexander Volkov and Curtis Blaydes managed to defeat but not stop Cortes-Acosta in the UFC, and Walker got the job done in the third round.
“I knew it was going to be tough,” Walker said. “He had never been knocked out, but I was going to find a way to finish that fight. And that’s what I did. I felt his hands were heavy, but not explosive. Explosive punches land and knock you out. I felt his punches were heavy. He would hit me and move me around, I would lose my balance, but I didn’t feel his power. If he had knockout power, he would hit me and I would go down cold.”
