WHEN PAUL REDMOND saw his face staring down at him from a huge billboard on Pearse Street last October, it provided him with a measure of reassurance about his place in the UFC.
By then, Redmond didn’t quite know where he stood. After back-to-back defeats earlier in 2015, he was in danger of being shown the door. Having received no contact from the UFC since losing to Robert Whiteford three months earlier, as well as being passed over for a place on an upcoming event in his hometown which he was desperate to be involved in, the signs were ominous.
Featuring in a ‘Fighting Irish’ promotional campaign which included billboards and posters all over Dublin may have put his mind at ease, but only temporarily. Redmond was merely used as an extra body to add substance to a marketing myth which claimed that fighters from Ireland were taking over mixed martial arts.
The bad news came just a few weeks later. Accumulating a record of 0-2 in the octagon may have been met with more lenience from the UFC in the past, but with the demand for fights exceeding supply and the organisation struggling to keep its athletes active, Redmond became the latest victim of a cull of an over-populated roster.
“It definitely entered my head at the time that maybe I won’t be getting cut if they’re putting up those posters and billboards and that stuff, but I was gone not long after that so it didn’t make much of a difference in the end,” says Redmond, who insists that there were no hard feelings in spite of the misleading marketing move.
“A lot of people asked me did I feel hard done by, but I couldn’t say I did. It made sense for them to put me up on it. I was still technically on the roster at that point, I was one of the Irish guys in the UFC, so that’s obviously how they saw it.
They just said there were no fights that made sense for me at the minute. There’s no malice in it. It’s business for them. I lost two fights and I was released, just like a lot of guys in the same position have been. That’s life.”
Redmond could handle being let go. He was realistic enough to know that he hadn’t done enough to prove himself to be an asset to the UFC. However, he could have done without the four months of sitting on his hands before discovering that his services were no longer required. That meant he was unable to take opportunities to compete elsewhere.
It was a year ago this weekend that Redmond lost to Whiteford in Glasgow. More importantly, it’s approaching two years since his last victory. He was scheduled to finally return last month — twice — but both bouts fell through. For a man who fought eight times in 26 months to earn his UFC call-up, it’s been a frustrating period of inactivity.
Redmond didn’t enter the UFC on his own terms either. When he was signed in January 2015, Cage Warriors was a conveyor belt of up-and-coming talent. If you were winning there regularly, as he was, the call from MMA’s leading organisation was inevitable. Nevertheless, it took Redmond by surprise when it eventually came.
The UFC needed someone to fight in Sweden in 16 days’ time. An injury pull-out meant Mirsad Bektic was without an opponent. The door had finally opened for Redmond. And on the organisation’s biggest ever show outside of North America [at the time] too.
Headlined by a number one contender bout in the light-heavyweight division between Alexander Gustafsson and Anthony ‘Rumble’ Johnson, UFC on FOX 14 was set to take place in Stockholm’s 35,000-capacity Tele2 Arena.
For Redmond, there was one problem. And it was a substantial one. He was a lightweight. The bout was at featherweight. Although he was toying with the idea of moving down a weight-class, Redmond hadn’t seen 145lbs on a scales since his early teens. Trimming down to 155lbs was already challenging enough. The lingering effects of an enjoyable Christmas complicated things even further.
But this was the UFC. Offers from MMA’s premier organisation don’t come around very often. If Redmond rejected this one, he wasn’t sure when, or even if, another might materialise. He’d need to endure an arduous fortnight of dieting while simultaneously trying to prepare for the biggest fight of his life. There would also be many gruelling hours in the sauna required to shed the pounds.
“If I had turned it down, they wouldn’t have asked me again… unless I had gone on and won another five, six, seven fights,” Redmond insists.
Looking back on the weight-cut now, I’d say another half an hour in the sauna and I probably would have died.
“We landed in Stockholm on the Tuesday before the fight on the Saturday, and you do like a pre-weigh-in to check where your weight is at. I jumped up on the scales and I was 171lbs. I had to be at least 146lbs three days later. Looking back at it now, it was crazy. Trying to cut 25lbs in that space of time, absolute madness. I know that now. But I was on death’s door.”
Redmond ultimately missed weight by 3lbs, for which he was fined 20% of his purse. After draining his body 24 hours before the bout, he displayed incredible resilience over the course of a difficult 15 minutes against one of the most promising fighters in the UFC’s featherweight division, which concluded with a unanimous-decision win for Bektic.
Redmond had been thrust into the deep end for his first experience of life in the UFC, and while he emerged with his head held high following a brave performance, it was a tough start on his sport’s biggest stage in exchange for a cheque worth $10,000.
“I didn’t even get 10 grand,” Redmond explains. “By the time the fine, taxes, expenses and all that are taken out, you’re left with buttons. I cut 33lbs in 12 days. I don’t even think about it too much. It happened, I don’t dwell on it. But people are killing themselves to make weight with these short-notice opportunities to fight on big shows, and it’s great, but at what cost?”
As the possibility of being signed by the UFC became more realistic during Redmond’s Cage Warriors days, the Team Ryano product vowed that he would quit his job with Intel in order to train full-time as soon as an offer transpired. Redmond did just that, but contrary to what some young fighters may believe about life in the UFC, nothing changed.
“I had that in my head too at the time,” Redmond admits. “It was a good eye-opener for me and it’s good that I can tell the younger guys coming through not to expect their lives to change if they do get to the UFC. It’s just another place to fight. It’s work.
“There are only a tiny handful of guys who are making serious money from MMA. It’s not that I expected more, because I didn’t know what to expect. But nothing was different at all. It just meant that I got to train twice a day. But that was it. Things stayed the same.”
It’s a message Redmond is now in a position to impart to his younger team-mates in Finglas who hope to be knocking on the door of the UFC in the coming years. Keeping all their eggs in one basket is a risk that’s not worth taking, believes Redmond, who’s now planning on working towards a bachelor’s degree in strength and conditioning to add to his previous qualifications.
“You do need something you can fall back on,” he says. “I’m a plumber by trade and I’m a personal trainer. I can coach as well if I want to, so I have a couple of things to fall back on.
If you put absolutely everything into this sport, you make it to the UFC but you end up getting cut, like me, after two fights, then where do you go?
“I have other stuff to rely on but the younger generation of fighters coming up now don’t seem to have that base of something else, and that’s not good for them. Even if you do get to the UFC and you’re doing well, an injury could keep you out for a year and that’s 12 months of no income. Always have something else.”
MMA fighters are often asked why they invest so much effort in a sport which delivers substantial financial rewards to so few. Perhaps if Redmond and his peers had worked as hard at football or rugby, their bank accounts would be healthier. But for the 29-year-old Dubliner, money has never been the main incentive to compete in MMA. If it was, he’d have thrown in the towel long before a shot in the UFC appeared on the horizon.
His two-fight stint in the UFC didn’t bring him any great fortune, and now that he has returned to the European regional circuit, the earnings will be significantly smaller again. They say it’s difficult to get into the UFC, even more difficult to stay there, but the most difficult thing of all is to get a second bite at the cherry after you’ve already been deemed surplus to requirements.
Redmond is at peace with the fact that he may never fight there again, so what drives him to continue competing after he has already had a glimpse of what life is like at the summit?
“Well, I never started this to get into the UFC,” he says. “I only started it to lose weight and get fit. Obviously your goals do change eventually and I was on that bit of a tear with Cage Warriors. It was only then that I started to say to myself, ‘Hang on, maybe the UFC might be feasible’. But ultimately I do this because I love it.
“Why do people play the piano? Because they love doing it, not because they think they’re going to become a famous musician.
“When I wake up in the morning, I can’t wait to go training. I just love doing it. I don’t do it for money. Everyone thinks when you get to the UFC — big arenas, big production, televised around the world — that you’re automatically getting big money, but you’re not.”
Being cut by the UFC last year didn’t deter Redmond from persisting with his career as an MMA fighter, and neither did the experience of being in attendance for a bout which resulted in a fellow fighter losing his life.
One of Redmond’s team-mates had fought earlier on the evening of 9 April at the National Stadium in Dublin, so he was ringside to watch Charlie Ward’s third-round TKO of Joao Carvalho — who died tragically in Beaumont Hospital two days later.
“I went to the toilet after the fight and when I came back out I heard that the lad had been taken to hospital and they didn’t know if he was okay,” Redmond recalls. “There had been a similar thing with the boxer [Nick Blackwell] around that time. He fought Chris Eubank Junior, ended up in hospital for a while, but came through in the end. You were hoping that it would be the same sort of outcome.
Then when the news broke a couple of days later that he had passed away, I woke up and saw it all over the place on social media from outlets that normally wouldn’t touch MMA. It hit me like a ton of bricks.
“The bottom line is that no one is in this to get hurt or to hurt anyone. Your opponent getting hurt is a by-product of you winning a sporting contest, of course, but that’s not your main objective. I’ve never wanted to hurt any opponent. It’s competition.
“You’re just showcasing the skills you’ve been working on. Nobody wants to be involved in anybody being killed. It’s just a terribly sad incident, beyond words. Every fighter wants to go in, compete and then go home to their family. It was horrible.”
But did it cause Redmond to have second thoughts about stepping into the cage again?
“No. Everybody knows the risks,” he says. “But you do it because you love it. As far as I know, only two or three guys have died in the ring in MMA. I think there are about nine or ten deaths overall and most of them seem to be from weight-cutting issues. It’s a freak occurrence. There aren’t many contact sports where you can absolutely guarantee that such a risk won’t be there. That’s how I see it anyway.”
With extreme weight-cuts a thing of the past, Redmond long-awaited return will come on 10 September when he faces Jack McGann in the more comfortable environs of the lightweight division at BAMMA 26. The event at Dublin’s 3Arena was due to take place in June but the British promotion pushed it back in order to implement increased safety measures in response to Joao Carvalho’s death.
McGann is one of the UK’s most highly-touted prospects and a win over Redmond, with the ‘former UFC fighter’ tag beside his name, would represent a significant scalp. Redmond could now become a stepping stone for the kind of ambitious up-and-comers that he once was… or else he can do as he was told by UFC matchmaker Sean Shelby:
Go off, pick up a few wins and we’ll give you another shot.”
Redmond says: “I’m actually in the same mindset now as I was going back a few years; fighting just because I enjoy it, and not aiming for some target ahead that may or may not be realistic. I’m just going out there to put into practice all the work I invest in the gym and hopefully people will enjoy watching that.
“If I get a couple of wins together, great; if it happens, it happens. But even then it won’t change anything. Whether I’m fighting for BAMMA or the UFC, I’ll be happy because I’ll be competing either way, and that’s what makes me happy. That’s what I love.”
Losing a few pounds and living a healthier lifestyle was Paul Redmond’s objective when he first encountered mixed martial arts. He ended up fighting on the biggest stage in the world — even though, ironically, the drastic weight-cut that was required to do so almost pushed him through “death’s door”.
Nevertheless, it’s a case of mission-more-than-accomplished. Redmond won’t hang the gloves up until he stops enjoying it. But thanks to the longest lay-off of his career since he first fought in 2009, his appetite for learning and competing has never been greater.
For now, he still feels he’s closer to the beginning than he is to the end.
