So you want to be a fighter?
The lavish, luxurious lifestyle of a professional athlete coupled with punching someone in the face for a living sounds easy enough to the average tough guy who is grinding away in some no-name gym.
It isn’t until a fighter makes it to the big stage that he learns his dreams aren’t quite what they seemed.
There is no mansion, robe and crown waiting on the other side for you in the fight business. Even for fighters who do make it to the UFC, a pot of gold isn’t guaranteed at the end of the rainbow. Some enter the fight business with a contingency plan to fall back on if their fighting career doesn’t pan out.
But then there are those like Bubba McDaniel, who saw his big break as a cast member on The Ultimate Fighter 17. He couldn’t imagine doing anything else in his life. So he went all-in as a fighter with literally nothing to fall back on. That was the first mistake, according to McDaniel when speaking with MMAFighting’s Marc Raimondi:
Man, I should have started trying to get into school or something like that along with it. I should have started to go, OK what can I do for when I’m done? What happens when I finish with MMA and get my next step together? I never did that. I was so focused on just getting to the UFC, just getting a fight in the UFC, having people know my name. That was my ultimate thing.
McDaniel, a former training partner of Jon Jones, ended his run on TUF 17 as part of UFC middleweight Uriah Hall’s highlight reel. But he bounced back on finale night with a submission win over fellow cast member Gilbert Smith.
It would be McDaniel’s only moment of triumph in the UFC, as he went on to lose back-to-back bouts against Brad Tavares and Sean Strickland. There was no opportunity for a third strike for the Texas native, who was promptly released after his second loss.
A general consensus among casual fans is that all UFC fighters are financially stable—an illusion created by the mainstream sports world. However, the sad reality is that fighters aren’t paid like other professional athletes. For every Georges St-Pierre and Ronda Rousey, there are tons of fighters like McDaniel who are starving from their pint-sized piece of the pie.
You also have to factor in the price of training camps, management, travel expenses and taxes. According to McDaniel, fighting is “not that glamorous.”
He is contemplating retirement after taking a regional fight with Marvin Babe for $1,500 in Oklahoma’s Fist of Fury promotion in March. A couple of fights before that, he took on Ron Fields at heavyweight in Indiana’s Extreme Combat Challenge for free.
Things really got hard for McDaniel last October in a fight against Emiliano Sordi at Bellator 128, where he suffered a herniated disc. His right side was aflame of pain, and he experienced numbness in his hand. Fighting was already out of the question until he healed, but the injury also limited his opportunities to find work outside of fighting.
It was one of the toughest moments of his life.
After being cleared to fight and defeating Babe, McDaniel took on an extra job of doing siding and mowing lawns, which nets him $60 per day on average. The struggles reached the point of him actually volunteering to go to jail last week because he couldn’t afford to pay a $159 ticket for not wearing a seatbelt.
As an inmate for a day, he got the ticket removed and three free meals: "People are like what’s wrong with manual labor. Man, I'm doing it. What do you mean what’s wrong with it? I just don’t make as much as what it would be to sit in jail. That’s just the way it was. It was more economical for me to go to jail than it was to work."
McDaniel is far from a bitter human being. He credits fighting for giving him a positive avenue in life. Without it, he believes he would likely be wasting away in a prison cell somewhere. But he also realizes his mistakes in pursuing the same dream that drives thousands of young athletes all around the globe.
To those individuals, McDaniel offers these words of advice: "Go to school, get an education, have a good job. Something like that. Have work skills that you can fall back on if MMA doesn’t work out for you."
Jordy McElroy is a featured columnist for Bleacher Report. He also is the MMA writer for FanRag Sports and co-founder of The MMA Bros.