Serra submitted Pete Spratt and took decisions from Shonie Carter and Chris Lytle to win the eight-man tournament. His prize: a date with welterweight champion Georges St. Pierre in the UFC 67 main event on April 7, 2007 at the Toyota Center in Houston. St. Pierre was a prohibitive favorite entering the cage -- and with good reason. In his prime, the Tristar Gym superstar was thought to be the closest thing mixed martial arts had to a perfect fighter. He was 13-1 and had avenged the only defeat on his resume, stopping Matt Hughes with a second-round head kick and subsequent ground-and-pound to capture the welterweight crown some five months earlier.
Most observers did not expect Serra to last a round with St. Pierre, much less make it competitive. When champion and challenger locked horns, Serra got down to business, pressured GSP with winging power punches and denied him the chance to establish any kind of rhythm. A right hand stunned and floored St. Pierre, who sprang to his feet in a fog. Serra ripped into him with swarming punches, until another right connected upstairs and sent the favorite crashing to his back. The Renzo Gracie-trained Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt pounced on the fallen St. Pierre and kept firing his hands into his face until referee John McCarthy had seen enough and called for the stoppage 3:25 into Round 1. Shock swept across the 15,269 in attendance, as UFC President Dana White strapped the belt to Serra’s waist.
“I knew if it went bad, with the game plan we were having, it was going to be a quick night, maybe brutal but quick,” Serra later told the Sherdog Radio Network’s “Beatdown” program. “But listen, I don’t want to get tired in there. If I look to try to make it a grappling match with the guy, it would get exhausting if I just tried to put the guy down a lot, and you don’t want to be that guy jumping guard from Guam. I knew [with] my one title shot, it definitely wasn’t going to be boring. It was kind of thrilling. It was like a thrill in that sense because it’s like, I know I’m going for broke out here. I know it. I know I’ve either got to stop him or I can get stopped. You’ve got to put yourself out there.”
Meanwhile, St. Pierre struggled to wrap his arms around what had transpired.
“I lost -- period,” he told Sherdog.com. “I’m not used to that. I hate to lose, but I have to regroup and change some stuff, come back stronger. I didn’t take Matt Serra lightly. I don’t know. I got into the fight [and] I was kind of stiff. I trained well and everything. I felt like I was stiff, and I didn’t let my body go. It was weird. I don’t know. I have no excuses.”
St. Pierre went on to win his next 12 bouts and reclaimed the welterweight championship by putting away Serra with second-round knee strikes to the body in their UFC 83 rematch a little more than a year later. However, 10 years to the day after it all went down in Houston, his loss to the man they call “The Terror” remains the most shocking upset in UFC history.