Milwaukee - UFC Fight Night, December 2018
I always had trouble making friends when I was growing up. As a non-religious Latino, I didn’t exactly fit in at my private catholic high school that was 90% wealthy conservative white kids.
One of the few people I was actually close to was my best friend Juan Adams. Juan and I met in the 6th grade and were pretty tight through grade school.
After high school I went to Texas A&M while he went to Virginia Military Institute on a wrestling scholarship. Despite going our separate ways we still stayed in touch.
Juan eventually started training in Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) and in 2017 he made his professional debut with Legacy Fighting Championship, a small regional promotion based in Texas.
After winning his first three fights in the first round in impressive fashion, Juan was offered a chance to compete on Dana White’s Tuesday Night Contender Series, for a chance to win a contract with Ultimate Fighting Championship, or as it’s more commonly known, the UFC.
After beating his opponent in dominant fashion in a little over four minutes, Juan was offered a UFC contract. I immediately knew that I needed to be at his first fight.
After a few months with no news, he was finally offered a fight on their card in Milwaukee on December 15th. Unlike Pay-Per-View cards, Fight Nights are usually aired on channels like FOX Sports 1, ESPN, or network TV.
These cards are typically made up of lesser known, up-and-coming fighters. Often times these cards have respected veterans of the sport that are past their prime who are basically fed to younger fighters to lend credibility to their rising stardom.
Juan was signed to fight veteran Chris de la Rocha in a preliminary fight in the heavyweight division. Juan was able to get a few tickets for friends and family and was kind enough to give me one.
I landed in Milwaukee shortly after 8 in the morning on Friday, the day before the fight. I hailed an Uber from the airport and headed to the Hyatt Regency in the heart of downtown. The UFC was using this hotel to accommodate all of their fighters, personnel, and friends and family.
As a fan of the sport for many years, staying at the hotel with the rest of the fighters was amazing. There was a UFC star everywhere you looked: Heavyweight champion and #1 pound-for-pound fighter in the world Daniel Cormier, fellow Bostonians Joe Lauzon, Rob Font, and Mike Rodriguez, Andrea Lee, as well as legendary coaches Ray Longo and Matt Serra, just to name a few.
Juan’s official weigh-in was at 10 AM. Juan is a big guy, and for his fight, he had to cut roughly 30 pounds to make weight at 265. The week leading up to weigh-ins are grueling for fighters as you practically starve and dehydrate yourself for days, sometimes weeks, in order to make weight. This process can be dangerous, in fact one preliminary fight between Jessica-Rose Clark and Andrea Lee was scrapped after Clark was hospitalized due to complications with her weight cut.
“I’m a huge fan of the zebra cake”
After his weigh-in, I met up with Juan and his coaches at the breakfast buffet at the hotel. After starving himself for days, Juan was ready to eat. Despite having eggs, bacon, sausage, potatoes, and more at his disposal, he instead wanted to indulge in one of his favorite treats: Little Debbie’s Zebra Cakes.
After breakfast, Juan had a busy schedule with several pre-fight commitments as well as the arrival of his girlfriend who was flying in from Houston. I took this time to go back to my hotel room to take a nap after having woken up at 3 AM.
The ceremonial weigh-ins were open to the public and were scheduled for 6 PM at the Fiserv Forum, a short 8 - 10 minute walk away from my hotel. Completed in the June 2018, the arena serves primarily as the home of the Milwaukee Bucks but also acts as a multi-purpose venue for hockey, college basketball, and concerts.
The Fiserv Forum is a beautiful, state-of-the-art complex. That modernity came with a big price tag; over $500 million. Although the four co-owners of the Bucks are worth a combined $6 billion, the team and the NBA demanded that the good people of Wisconsin pony up for half of it.
With promises of spurring economic activity in downtown Milwaukee, the state legislature agreed to fund the project to the tune of $250 million despite the fact that economists almost unanimously agree that “sports subsidies cannot be justified on the grounds of local economic development, income growth or job creation.“
These ceremonial weigh-ins are fairly straight forward affairs. Ever since the UFC started having the official weigh-ins at the hotel where the fighters are staying, there are no longer any big televised surprises if a fighter comes in over weight. Now the only time these events make headlines is when two fighters get a little too aggressive during the photo ops.
After the weigh-ins, Juan’s schedule kept him pretty isolated in order for him focused ahead of his fight tomorrow. That left me to wander the streets of downtown Milwaukee on my own. I stopped at the Oak Barrel Public House, a short five minute walk from the Fiserv Forum.
The atmosphere inside was pretty quaint and the bartenders were quite friendly. I stayed for about two hours chit chatting with the staff as well as some of the people sitting next to me who were curious as to what brought me to Milwaukee in the middle of December.
After finishing my dinner and a few drinks, I headed back to the hotel since there was not much else to do downtown by myself. The hotel lobby was full of other people who, like me, were there to support some of the fighters on the card. Coaches, UFC personnel, journalists, and several others were all hanging around having drinks and shooting the breeze.
With nothing better to do, I sat at the bar in the hotel and sparked up a conversation about football with some other people at the bar. After a bit of banter about football, I discovered they were some of the coaches for another UFC fighter on the card, Adam Milstead. We stuck around until last call before finally heading to our respective rooms to get some sleep before the big day.
When morning broke on the morning of the 15th, I went downstairs to get breakfast and to get a little work done on my laptop. The lobby was buzzing with MMA stars, UFC top brass, journalists, coaches, team mates, and others.
The gates for the event opened at 2 PM with Juan’s fight, the first one on the card, starting at 2:30.
After passing through security, I headed to section 105 in the lower bowl of the arena. I was easily one of the first guests to their seats as the forum was still mostly empty. The seats were absolutely phenomenal with a great view of the octagon.
Within a few minutes, members of Juan’s family, including his brother, Gator, and grandmother, took their seats next to me. It had been nearly eight years since I had last seen all of them and it was very touching to see them again.
