Dominick Reyes | Grateful To Get To Do All This Again

He wasn’t thinking about what he gets to do heading into his fight with Blachowicz five years ago.

Nearly eight months removed from his debated decision loss to Jon Jones at UFC 247—a setback he hilariously discusses in an outstanding commercial for True Classic alongside Michael Bisping, Miesha Tate, Stephen Thompson and others—Reyes was operating from a place of entitlement. He felt he beat Jones and didn’t want to be sharing the Octagon with the Polish veteran. His preparation was fueled by frustration, and he was allowing everything that had happened that February impact him heavily.

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“It wasn’t the fight I wanted,” he said of the bout with Blachowicz, which he lost by second-round stoppage. “I wanted to fight Jon, I wanted the rematch, so I didn’t want to be there, I didn’t want to train. I was feeling so frustrated, and my team was on eggshells because every little thing I was snapping about, being a bully to my own team; hitting them hard and doing things you shouldn’t be doing.

“I had so much frustration and anger inside of myself, and I was doing too much; I wasn’t just grateful. I was taking everything for granted — ‘I deserve this, I deserve that’ — and not being the person who I am but, instead, letting the circumstance really affect me.”

A fight with Jiří Procházka followed and ended with Reyes getting knocked out, prompting him to eventually venture to Connecticut to train with Glover Teixeira and Alex Pereira hoping “Poatan” and his coach had the magic cure-all that would remedy his situation.

“Obviously, that’s not the magic formula,” Reyes said with a laugh, enjoying the early morning sunshine in Perth just a couple days out from his first headlining turn since that bout with Procházka. “Everybody has their own formula, and that’s what I learned. It was a learning curve for me, but it was public, where everybody saw me going through these things.”

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There are moments we forget that, in addition to being world-class athletes and competitors stepping into the Octagon for our entertainment, the men and women that compete under the UFC banner are human too and have to contend with the ups and downs of life, work, expectations, and disappointment just like the rest of us. While most of us experience setbacks in solitude, fail in places where few people are watching, Reyes and his contemporaries go through all of that in the public eye, and learning how to loss and deal with everything that comes along with it is something everyone experiences differently.

Having raced to his championship clash with Jones without faltering once, the compounding frustration of losing that fight and each of the next three that followed left Reyes looking everywhere for answers. Eventually, he figured out the answers he needed were right there in front of him the whole time.

“It’s not like I lost early in my career or even as an amateur, so all those things I had to find out about myself, I found out against the best fighters in the world, with people rooting for my downfall and things like that,” recalled Reyes. “I let all of that get to me instead of just doing me, finding what makes me happy and fills my heart; the training style that is me. It’s all within myself — that’s what I realized after the Spann fight: it’s all within me and I need to stop searching outside of myself for what I already have.

“Once I did that and got my team back together — my Island of Misfit Toys team — we’ve put it together and it’s been amazing,” he added, a massive smile spreading across his face. “Now it’s fun again — really fun and exciting, and I don’t feel nervous or worried. There is always fear because you don’t know what’s going to happen, but I go into the fights and the outcome isn’t up to me: it’s up to my God, Jesus Christ. It’s up to the man above who has a plan for me; all I can do is prepare the best I can prepare.”

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Last June, Reyes earned his first victory in just shy of five years, collecting a first-round stoppage win over Dusitn Jacoby that left him overcome with emotion as he stood triumphant inside the Octagon. Six months later, he stopped Anthony Smtih at UFC 310, registering two wins in the same calendar year for the first time since 2019 when he was ascending and undefeated.

Earlier this year, Reyes made it three straight with a first-round knockout win over Nikita Krylov at UFC 314.

At the start of the week, Reyes posted the poster for this weekend’s fight card on his Instagram page, adding a series of hashtags, including “#notbackbetter.” It’s his response to those that keep saying, “He’s back.”

He’s not back; he’s better.

At the same time, there is something familiar about where he stands now, and what lies ahead of him should he successfully navigate this weekend’s class with Ulberg.

“It's right where I should be, man, and it feels great,” he said of headlining, of being back in the Top 10, and squaring off with the third-ranked fighter in the division, who enters on an 8-fight winning streak. “From being so low, almost out of the rankings, to now being back to the top of the division is frickin’ crazy, man. It’s crazy to think that I went all the way down and now we’re back up