Athletes
NATHANIEL WOOD: ARLA’S SUPERHERO RETURNS
British Featherweight Speaks About Fatherhood, His Struggles in Abu Dhabi, And Getting Back To Work This Weekend In Manchester
Nathaniel Wood is in a good place, mentally and physically, just a few days out from his return to the Octagon in Manchester, where he takes on Daniel Pineda in the final preliminary card matchup at UFC 304 on Saturday night.
A lot of it has to do with the new addition to his family — his infant daughter Arla — who has given the London native an entirely different outlook on life in just a few short, nerve-racking weeks.
“She’s really changed my outlook on life, where the things I thought mattered, don’t matter,” says Wood, beaming as he spoke about his daughter, who was born with congenital diaphragmatic hernia (CDH) and was recently diagnosed with a hole in her heart. “When she came out, she had to go straight away — they had to put tubes down her throat, sedate her — and the first thing I thought and my body told me was ‘I would die for that girl right now.’
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“I can’t explain it, because I used to think, ‘Ah yeah, you have a baby, you love it, of course, but maybe it takes time because I don’t know this baby; we have to form a relationship.’ Nope. With me, something in my body went, ‘I would die for this baby in an instant.’
“She hadn’t even seen me, I didn’t even know her, but something in me just changed.”
Wood explains that he wants to thrive in the sport in order to provide the best life possible for his daughter — a sentiment echoed by the majority of athletes with children — but underscores that he doesn’t want to be hanging around, taking fights well beyond his best before date simply because he’s trying to make ends meet.
Instead, he wants to do his best to excel now, squirrel away what he can, and put himself in a position where in 15 or 20 years, when his daughter is fully cognizant of what her dad does for a living, he’ll be happily settled into a comfortable retirement and she’ll be able to look back on his career and their time together and be proud of her old man.
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“I want to be a superhero and make loads of money for her, make her proud,” he says, the smile still plastered across his face. “Right now, she doesn’t know what I’m getting on about; she looks at me and thinks ‘What is this guy on about with the silly faces?’ but I’d like to think that in 20 years time, 15 years time, she goes, ‘I’m proud of my Dad.’
“I want to be her superhero.”
Nathaniel Wood Fight Week Interview | UFC 304
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Nathaniel Wood Fight Week Interview | UFC 304
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Wood is already well on his way, and it has little to do with his success inside the Octagon.
A couple fights back, following his win over Charles Jourdain, the 31-year-old Londoner mentioned in his post-fight interview with Michael Bisping that he “suffers with anxiety pretty bad” and that he trained for Jourdain like he was training for a monster.
To Wood, it was no big deal — those close to him were already well aware of his struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and anxiety, and he had structures in place that helped him contend with both — but for many watching live or catching the admission after the fact, it was an eye-opening moment that become a transformative thing for the British featherweight.
“The main thing for me was the amount of Instagram messages I had flooding in from people saying how much it’s helped them, having someone that’s in the UFC talk about it made them feel not as embarrassed about it,” explains Wood, who has continued to speak about his struggles and the importance of addressing mental health issues. “For me, that’s such a good feeling, because I know how hard it is and I know that not everyone is as fortunate as I am to have family members like I have.
“It’s not that I can reply to every single person, but just having someone look at me and think, ‘I can resonate with what he’s saying’ is a really good feeling.”
Admittedly nervous about opening up about it at first out of concern that people would accuse him of looking to “jump on the mental health bandwagon,” Wood notes that he’s yet to encounter any negative pushback since opening up about the challenges he deals with, and the universally positive response means he’s only going to continue his efforts going forward.
“It’s nice to think that me talking about it is making people less embarrassed or insecure or maybe they’re more willing to open up,” he adds. “I’m gonna keep doing it! I’m gonna bore people with it, but we’ll help people along the way.”
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While he’s in good spirits when we speak and describes himself as being “in a good place” and “mentally strong” as he heads towards his bout with Pineda on Saturday, that wasn’t the case the last time he was readying to make the walk to the Octagon last year in Abu Dhabi.
Having earned victories in each of his first three fights since shifting to the featherweight ranks, including a unanimous decision win over divisional mainstay Andre Fili just a couple months earlier in London, Wood was undeniably on the rise in the 145-pound weight class heading into his bout with Muhammad Naimov, who debuted earlier in the year with an upset, knockout win over Jamie Mullarkey up a division.
But anxiety and mental health issues don’t care about what else is going on in your life and whether it’s a good time for intrusive thoughts to creep into your brain; they just come, unannounced and uninvited, and for Wood, they came at the absolute worst time possible.
“I just did not want to be there,” he says. “As soon as I walked into the cage — and it sounds bad because it means everything to me — but I couldn’t have cared less. I was like, ‘Don’t care!’ The crowd were booing, and I as far as I was concerned, I was done. ‘Take the gloves — I’m done with the sport, done with everything.’
“As you know, when you’re in a dark place, you can’t necessarily see the light at the end of the tunnel,” he continues, me having made it known to him earlier that I suffer from anxiety and depression, and therefore have some sense of what he deals with at times. “I was in Abu Dhabi, wasn’t doing anything, and I was a little anxious about a few things that were going on in my head. Instead of getting on the phone, talking to my wife, going to have a coffee, go and get out of that place, I’m sitting in the room thinking, ‘I’ll be fine.’
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“Before I know it, I’ve just spent 12 hours going over something in my head and it’s latched on. Now when my dad sends me, ‘Let’s go train,’ I don’t want to go and train because I’m anxious about something.
“I let that dark cloud latch on, get ahold of me, and fight week, I didn’t think about the fight; I was too busy thinking about those intrusive thoughts and worries in my head,” he adds, detailing something painfully familiar to me and innumerable others. “I wasn’t in the right place at all.
“That’s the only fight where I had that affect me on fight week and in the fight. It proved to me that you have to be in the right mindset. I know where I went wrong, and I’m gonna make sure with this one that nothing like that happens again.”
This weekend’s home game in Manchester brings with it an element of comfort and simplicity that helps Wood stay in the right mindset as he readies to make that walk.
Every fighter is different when it comes to “fighting at home” versus “fighting on the road,” and while his head coach Brad Pickett was a massive fan of traveling abroad to do battle, Wood is the exact opposite.
“For me, I need my family; I want my family there,” says Wood, who is unbeaten on British soil over the last eight years, a run that has yielded 10 consecutive victories, including a 3-0 mark in England in the UFC. “I want to know that if my wife needs me, I’m two hours away; that keeps my mind mentally clear, and that’s a big thing.
“Knowing I’m in my hometown, my country is like an extra motivation; it’s like I’m defending my territory against someone that is coming across from the other side of the world,” he adds, smiling at the thought of walking out before the partisan crowd at Co-op Live on Saturday. “That mindset helps, and then obviously the crowd. How can you not get spurred on? I think when you’ve got that hometown (advantage), how can you not be motivated?”
It is sure to be a supportive and boisterous ensemble this weekend as the UFC returns to Manchester for the first time since UFC 204, when Michael Bisping successfully defended his middleweight title against Dan Henderson.
Wood was 8-3 at the time, still a couple fights away from winning the Cage Warriors bantamweight title and the run that helped propel him to the UFC.
Now, he’s a 30-year-old father, champing at the bit to get back to work in order to get rid of the sour taste in his mouth that has lingered from his last fight and continue down the road to doing everything he can to make Arla proud.
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“It’s gonna mean everything to me,” he says after a deep exhale. “This is the first fight now where I have my daughter here, and even though she won’t know what’s going on, I’m thinking, ‘I want to make you proud.’ I want to get on the mic and say, ‘That was for you, Baby!’
“It means a lot to me. Family aside, this sport means a lot to me — I love competing, I love competing against the best in the world. I believe I’m one of the best in the world, so I know to prove that, I’ve just got to win fights.
“Business-wise, it means a lot, and family-wise, it means everything, so I’m just happy to be back at fight week.”
UFC 304: Edwards vs Muhammad 2 took place live from Co-op Live in Manchester, England on July 27, 2024. See the final Prelim & Main Card Results, Official Scorecards and Who Won Bonuses - and relive the action on UFC FIGHT PASS!
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