Corey Anderson-Ovince Saint Preux fight between friends arranged on short notice

Corey Anderson figured this day would come. Ovince Saint Preux did, too.

While training together at EXOS, a performance company in Arizona, last year, the two light heavyweights became friends. They also agreed that should the time arrive when they would face one another in the UFC’s octagon, all would be cool.

“We talked,” Saint Preux said Wednesday at UFC 217 media day. “It was like, ‘Look there’s going to be a point in time where we fight each other anyway.’ So at the end of the day, it’s just business.”

Anderson’s original opponent for this Saturday at Madison Square Garden, Patrick Cummins, pulled out of the fight two weeks ago with a staph infection. Once he was out, Saint Preux jumped on the opportunity.

“He tweeted me like, ‘Your fight got pulled, I don’t have a fight, you wanna do it?’ ” Anderson said. “I’m like, ‘Let’s go.’ Like I told you, I’m ready whenever. It’s time to go to work.”

Anderson (9-3) has fought people he’s friendly with and hung around with outside of the gym before. He said he was close with Matt Van Buren, his opponent in the final of Season 19 of “The Ultimate Fighter.” Anderson stopped him in 61 seconds. His opponent in the semifinal, Patrick Walsh, was his roommate on the show. Anderson won by decision.

“It’s all part of the sport,” Anderson, 28, said. “It doesn’t change a thing. You go out there, you got a job to do. Every day in practice, I beat up my teammates, my friends, my brothers, whatever it is, and they beat me up as well. It’s easy to put that on the side. Leave the friendship at the gate and when it’s over and done with it, hopefully we still got it.”

That Saint Preux, 34, asked for the fight barely four weeks after his last fight and with two-plus weeks to prepare shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. It’s kind of his thing.

“I’m known for having last-minute opponents and I’m known for taking last-minute fights,” Saint Preux said.

This is his third such fight of 2017. He was supposed to face Mauricio “Shogun” Rua, who pulled out a week before the fight in September. Instead, Saint Preux fought Yushin Okami and won by submission in the first round. Last February, he lost to newcomer Volkan Oezdemir on 12 days’ notice after Jan Blachowicz pulled out of their fight. And when he competed in Strikeforce, Saint Preux fought three times in seven weeks.

“As long as I keep myself active, I put myself in a rhythm,” Saint Preux said. “Once I get myself in a rhythm, it’s hard to break that. Unless I do it myself.”

Saint Preux will compete in his 15th UFC fight on Saturday, a number so startling to him that a couple minutes after his trainer told him that Wednesday, he still didn’t believe it. That’s a very active three-and-a-half-year run for an MMA fighter.

“A lot of times it can be mentally taxing being in the gym constantly, constantly, constantly, but at the end of the day, it’s something I do, it’s something I love,” said Saint Preux, a former linebacker at the University of Tennessee. “If I put my best foot forward I’m going to get the results that I want.”

By Mark La Monica

mark.lamonica@newsday.comLaMonicaMark

Mark La Monica is a deputy sports editor at Newsday. He also covers mixed martial arts.