Brooks (photo via Bellator.com)

By Kelsey Mowatt

Will Brooks has likely been mentally preparing for a title fight since he won Bellator’s lightweight tourney last November, but the rising fighter couldn’t have imagined the circumstances that have led to his title shot this Saturday. Last weekend, Bellator announced that champion Eddie Alvarez will no longer fight Michael Chandler on May 17th due to a concussion. As a result, Brooks has been tapped on approximately seven days notice to battle Chandler for the interim belt.

“It’s fun; it’s exciting, it’s part of the job,” Brooks noted on a recent medial call to announce the change. “I’ve been waiting for this opportunity man…Even before I got back into the tournament, even before I fought for Bellator, when I first got into this sport, I was thinking, how do you become one of the best fighters in your division? You fight the best fighters.”

“So what did I do? I jumped online and started looking at a list of the top fighters in my division, and of course there’s Chandler, there’s Alvarez, there’s (Anthony) Pettis, there’s all these different guys and right now with Bellator, the two guys I can get my hands on are Alvarez or Chandler,” furthered Brooks, who was originally scheduled to fight Nate Jolly at Bellator 120. “Right now I’m getting the opportunity to fight Chandler. This is what you do to become the best. You have to fight the best.”

For some time now, insiders and hardcore fans have been monitoring the progress of Brooks, who joined Bellator with considerable hype behind him. Aside from a knockout loss to Saad Awad last February, which Brooks avenged in October, the American Top Team fighter has done nothing but win. In November, the 27 year-old became just the second man to defeat Alexander Sarnavskiy, and won Bellator’s season 9 tourney in doing so.

Brooks (left) exchanging with Awad (photo via Bellator.com)

“There’s a lot of people asking, ‘oh who is Will Brook’; a lot of people doubting me, asking these questions, what do I bring to the table?” The 13-1 fighter noted. “Well, listen, come Saturday night, when me and Chandler step into the cage, I’m going to surprise everybody. I’m out to take this opportunity and make sure that people, later on, when my name gets mentioned, they know exactly who I am.”

“They won’t have to hesitate; they won’t have to jump online and look me up, they won’t have to ask any of these naive questions, or try to be all these trolls on Twitter or Facebook, or whatever,” an animated Brooks furthered. “They’ll definitely know who I am come Saturday night. I promise you that.”

As Brooks mentioned, in Chandler, not only will he face one of the promotion’s top lightweights, but he’ll battle one of Bellator’s best fighters period.

“For me, I’m ready to fight anybody,” Brooks noted earlier on in the call. “When I got the phone call to take this fight, I didn’t have hesitate, because I know that being at American Top Team every day, we train every day to fight. We don’t train to fight certain opponents, we’re training to get better every single day as a fighter, and that’s what I’ve been doing.”

Bellator 120 will be hosted by the Landers Center in Southhaven, Mississippi, and will also feature a lightweight tourney final between “Rampage” Jackson and “King Mo” Lawal.