Athletes
Michael Chiesa | A Life Forged By The Ultimate Fighter
Veteran Welterweight Discusses Impact Of Competing, Coaching On Show
There was a quick moment on the opening episode of The Ultimate Fighter this season where Michael Chiesa expressed how much it meant to him to be serving as an assistant coach for Team Cormier and coming back to the show that has profoundly impacted his life.
Chiesa competed on The Ultimate Fighter: Live, the one – and only - live season of the long-running reality TV competition, winning the show’s lightweight tournament. It was the launching point for a career that has now spanned 13 years and 20 appearances inside the Octagon, with the 21st coming this weekend opposite fellow TUF winner Court McGee.
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“The Ultimate Fighter was one of these experiences in life that can never be replicated for me,” began the 37-year-old, reflecting on his two different, but equally impactful, experiences of being on the show. “It really taught me how to grow up, in so many ways. I had to learn to handle grief, I had to learn what it was like to be in very challenging fights, very challenging situations in life."
The most challenging of those experiences was dealing with the passing of his father shortly after he earned his way into the competition with a submission win over Johnavan Vistante. After the win, Chiesa raced to one of the cameras and said, “That was for you, Dad!” Not long after, Mark Chiesa lost his long battle with leukemia; he was 52 years old.
The young lightweight flew home to pay his respects, but since getting on the show and earning his way into the UFC by winning the competition was a dream and goal he shared with his father, Chiesa returned to Las Vegas, ultimately advancing to the finals and joining the fraternity of Ultimate Fighter winners by submitting Al Iaquinta midway through the opening round of their bout on the finale.
“It taught me how to cook!” exclaimed Chiesa, laughing and declaring that he was serious as he watched me dying of laughter on the other side of our Zoom call. “I used to live off Clif bars and protein shakes because I worked a full-time job when I was coming up, so when I wasn’t slinging beers for King Beverage or building fences for Bulldog Fence, I was training, so I didn’t have time to learn these things.
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“Then I get immersed in this situation where it’s like, ‘this is what the life of a full-time fighter is gonna look like.’ (I learned that) I’m gonna have to juggle training with world-class athletes, fighting world-class athletes, figuring out how to take care of myself, how to cook.
“It literally taught me how to grow up,” he reiterated. “I would not be the man I am today without The Ultimate Fighter.”
The influence of the show on his life doesn’t only apply to his season as a contestant though.
While he’s still waiting for his chance to be one of the two head coaches leading a band of hopefuls on the show that catapulted him onto the biggest stage in the sport, donning the black and gold as an assistant coach for Daniel Cormier this season has been an eye-opening, life-changing experience.
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“To be alongside Daniel — you gotta remember: I bought the same wrestling shoes that he wore going into my senior year of high school because that was my favorite wrestler; him and Cale Sanderson, which is such a contrast of styles and they wrestled each other and had this rivalry,” said Chiesa, a broad smile naturally sweeping across his face. “But I loved Daniel Cormier, and as time went on, we became friends, and then, in that setting, we got to be coaches together, which is so rare.
“I’ve always said I wanted to walk Daniel Cormier’s line as close as I can, and obviously, I don’t have multiple world titles, I didn’t make two Olympic teams, but that doesn’t mean that I still can’t try to do as he does. Seeing how he handles his career as a broadcaster, how busy he is, how much he’s immersed himself into being a coach at Gilroy High School — seeing how much he does…”
He took a beat.
“Once again, being a coach on The Ultimate Fighter helped me grow up more,” he said. “The biggest thing I can say from being on The Ultimate Fighter as a competitor and being on The Ultimate Fighter as a coach is that every time I’ve gotten to be a part of that tournament, I have, in some way, shape, or form, found a way to grow up and mature.”
The truest example of that maturation comes in the way Chiesa currently looks at his career inside the Octagon, the ambitions he has for his post-fighting life, and the way one has influenced the other.
In addition to still being an active competitor in the welterweight division, Chiesa also coaches high school wrestling, works as a desk analyst on various UFC broadcasts, and serves as a commentator for a couple different regional promotions, as well as splitting color commentary reps with Alan Jouban on the last two seasons of Road to UFC.
By his own admission, he thrives in the grind, and loves having myriad things on the go, having done each of those secondary jobs during the build to his bout with McGee on Saturday night at State Farm Arena. If he had it his way, Chiesa would work the desk this weekend, breaking from the role just long enough to step into the Octagon and compete before returning to his post, the way Din Thomas does in those instances where he’s cornering a fighter between offering coaching insights on UFC events.
“My initial dream was to get into the UFC,” began Chiesa, who carries a two-fight winning streak into the weekend. “After being on The Ultimate Fighter, I really wanted to be an analyst, be a commentator, and at that point, to make that move, you’ve got to make decisions about ‘How many irons do I want in the fire?’
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“As a fighter, your time is very limited, so you’ve got to find ways to generate different sources of income and stuff like that, but I was like, ‘No, I’m all-in on MMA.’ I pushed all-in and it paid off. I got my opportunities to try to crack the lineup as a broadcaster. I get to do what I love every single day, even the times I gotta stay up super-late because I’m studying fights; I love every second of it.
“This is gonna sound odd, but it’s almost as big a blessing to me as being a competitor, if not more,” he said of getting to work on the broadcast side of things and continuing building that skill set. “I know how I got into the UFC — I’m a good fighter, I’m a world-class fighter — but the broadcasting stuff? I didn’t go to college! I still don’t know how it happened, and that makes me have that much more gratitude for those opportunities because it’s something I was very blessed with, I never take for granted, and something that I love doing; I love it so much.”
Seeing the opportunities on the broadcast side as a bigger blessing than those that have come inside the Octagon doesn’t sound odd at all, in part because his breakdown of the dynamic and how he reached that point is perfect.
What will sound odd to some is the next part.
“Maybe by year’s end I can get myself back in the rankings, and I don’t feel like the world title is out of reach,” continued Chiesa. “I’ve always said that if I never won a world championship, I thought I would look back on this as a failure, but now with all these other opportunities I get as a broadcaster, it hasn’t been for nothing, and I think that if I could crack the lineup, become a UFC commentator, I would feel just as validated for my efforts as if I won a world championship.
“That’s the ultimate to me: to get that belt wrapped around your waist. What a feeling that would be, and I would love to experience that feeling, but I feel like my career would be validated if I became a UFC commentator.
“In the history of the UFC, we’ve had well over a hundred champions, and maybe 20 commentators,” he added with a smile. “So if I can crack that Top 20, it would make me feel like a world champion.”
That shift in mindset has really only come in the last year, as Chiesa has worked diligently to get himself mentally back on track, which has, in turn, produced positive results inside the Octagon.
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After winning his first four fights following his move up to the welterweight division, the longtime Sikjitsu representative was closing in on title contention and holding down some prime real estate in the Top 10. A main event win over Neil Magny on Fight Island early in 2021 set him up for a pivotal showdown with Vicente Luque at UFC 265 in Houston, with the winner inching closer to the Top 5.
Chiesa lost the fight by first-round submission, then dropped a unanimous decision to surging hopeful Sean Brady in his next start. Eight months later, he got submitted by Kevin Holland less than three minutes into the opening round of their fight at UFC 291.
Tumbling from the brink of title contention to sitting on a three-fight losing streak made Chiesa take a long, hard look at himself and his approach, inside and outside of the cage.
“I started to lose my edge going into fights that I knew were gonna be tough, and this is me just being brutally honest with you,” began Chiesa, who credits the multitude of conversations he’s had with his Uncle Joe, a sports psychologist, for helping him get back to a good approach, mentally. “I didn’t have that problem when I was younger and I thought it was just my age, part of being an aging fighter, and it really wasn’t.
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“Sometimes you have to — and it doesn’t mean I don’t exhibit humility in life, but sometimes I have to remind myself that I’m a bad m*****f***** and that these guys have to worry about me as well. The biggest thing was remembering who I am, what I’m about, and that I’m a very dangerous guy on any given night, as well.
“It has really unlocked my true potential in training. I’ve been training smarter, training hard, putting my feet to the fire a lot more, and the fact that I used to think this was age and that was my problem is crazy because, at 37 years old, I’m training better than I have before.”
As much as Uncle Joe was the chief catalyst for this change, The Ultimate Fighter played a role, as well.
“I don’t really watch my old fights — I’m just not one of those guys — but since The Ultimate Fighter started, I was like, ‘I’m gonna go back and watch a couple of the fights from The Ultimate Fighter,” began Chiesa. “There was something that Urijah Faber told me that I lost sight of — and this kind of parlays into what I said about me being my own worst enemy with what goes on in my head — and it was ‘even if you have the worst practice ever, you have to find one good thing and focus on that one good thing,’ and I really lost sight of that.
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“I think that’s where my lack of confidence in those fights went,” he added, acknowledging that he used to fixate on the one thing that went wrong in practice while ignoring the litany of things he had done well during those same sessions. It’s a common affliction, one that can cripple your self-belief and the way you approach things, but it’s thankfully something Chiesa has addressed and corrected over these last couple fights.
“Now, if I have a really tough practice, and I only do one thing right and the rest sucked, I don’t even think about it; it’s not the focus,” he said smiling. “It just feels good to be very comfortable with combat again.”
This weekend, Chiesa will make the walk to face McGee in his fourth clash with another former winner of The Ultimate Fighter.
When I mention that he’s unbeaten in his previous three such outings and ask if competing against other winners carries special meaning for him, I didn’t even get to the end of my question before he started explain how much it means to him to share the Octagon with someone like McGee and continue to represent for The Ultimate Fighter: Live in these rare situations.
“Everybody around me knows how important that tournament is to me,” he started. “I hold it dear to my heart. Just to get through the first fight was like walking hell on Earth. I had to go through a lot of adversity just to get to the first fight once I got into the tournament.
“I do take a lot of pride in competing against guys that have been on The Ultimate Fighter. It’s not like you defend your title like you do as a world champion, but I want to defend my season. I take a lot of pride in coming from The Ultimate Fighter — to me that’s something that is very special — and so any time I get to compete against somebody that has been through that same tournament, I take it very serious.
“I would like to be ‘the toughest of TUF’ and get the best of these guys, especially because there are only so many guys that I can compete against that have won The Ultimate Fighter,” he added. “I want to be able to say — let’s say I don’t win a world title, I can say that I defended my Ultimate Fighter trophy four times over the course of my career and won all four times; and this is me speaking in the sense that I’m gonna win on Saturday night.”
Where Chiesa is two fights into a late-career resurgence of sorts, McGee only began his return to the win column last time out, blowing through Tim Means in his home state of Utah last October. It was the 40-year-old veteran’s first finish inside the Octagon since his first bout after winning the middleweight competition on Season 11 of the reality competition, and easily the best he’d looked in years.
“For one, to go compete against a guy like Court, a guy I have an incredible amount of respect for,” began Chiesa, pausing to shift into full-blown praise of the man he’ll share the cage with this weekend. “You want to talk about a journey through life and adversity and the things he’s accomplished and overcome. The importance of what he’s accomplished goes far beyond what he’s done in the Octagon, and for him to overcome his personal struggles with his sobriety, I can’t express how much admiration I have for this guy.
“And as weird as it is, us fighters, the people we have the most admiration and respect for are the people that we wanna fight, so I’m excited to go out there and compete against a guy like Court. Win, lose, or draw, I think a relationship will be forged when that 15 minutes or less are done, but I’ve gotta go out there, beat him, and put that stuff aside for those 15 minutes or less.”
Not that long ago, readying to make the walk would be an experience riddled with internal questions and doubts, stress about where he stands in the divisional hierarchy, and what he needs to do in order to get things moving in the right direction again or bring him another step closer to reaching his ultimate goal of claiming UFC gold.
But now, the older, wiser version of Chiesa that is fully aware and accepting of his own abilities and how dangerous he is inside the cage is filled with something entirely different.
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“It’s gratitude,” he said in regard to how he’s approaching things at this point of his career, now that he’s no longer encumbered by the mental shackles that limited him in the past. “It was a pressure cooker being in the Top 10, and I could get back there. If I got another opportunity to crack the Top 10, I would love to do it because I would love to do it in the headspace I’m in, and where my skill set and my body are now.
“Every training camp, all the stresses, everything that comes with it, I have gratitude for it now; it doesn’t weigh on me anymore,” added Chiesa. “I have so much gratitude for where I’m at — the health, the ability, the mental stability within myself to continue to compete, and do what I love every single day.
“It’s a blessing, and something I will never take for granted.”
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