By the time Ryan Spann clubbed Dominick Reyes on the prelims of UFC 281 in 2022, many of us had already left him for dead. It was his third knockout loss in a row, with a clear de-escalation of opposition, meaning Reyes was fighting the kinds of guys he should beat. Not only was he not beating them, he was getting knocked out brutally.
It was a monumental fall for a guy many thought had done enough to beat Jon Jones at UFC 247 two-and-a-half years earlier. Reyes was a couple of stubborn Texas gavels away from being the UFC’s light heavyweight champion, and now people were saying he should retire.
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But Reyes didn’t retire. In fact, he quietly picked up the pieces by winning three fights in a row heading into this weekend’s No. 1 contender fight with Carlos Ulberg out in Perth, Australia. It started with a breakthrough knockout of Dustin Jacoby 15 months ago, the end sequence coming just two minutes into the fight. That one got the monkey off his back.
He followed that up with a second-round finish of Anthony Smith at UFC 310, showing that his chin was still there. Then this past April, Reyes made it three in a row against Nikita Krylov, scoring a devastating one-punch knockout to signal he was all the way back.
How in the hell did he flip the script by turning into the fight game’s version Lazarus of Bethany?
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Well, let’s take a moment to enjoy the Dominator Zen.
“It all starts with my heart,” Reyes told Uncrowned this week, sporting a rugged bushman-style hat, à la Crocodile Dundee. “I’m coming from a place of gratitude. Every day is a gift. Every day is a gift for all of us. You could not wake up tomorrow, and it’s all over. That’s life in general.
“But as a fighter, all this is going to be over sooner than I think — the media, the traveling to other countries, all the tiny little inconveniences, they’re going to be over and I’m going to miss ’em. I’m going to miss going to training and getting ‘shark tanked.’ I’m going to miss all that stuff and I’m going to want to be able to do it and I won’t be able to.”
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That is the question that Dominick Reyes has been fielding as he reemerges as a contender in a division that perhaps hasn’t basked enough in his awe. How did he turn things around? What clicked that hadn’t before? How did he restore his confidence? Was there an epiphany along the way?
Fifteen years ago, Andrei Arlovski lost four fights in a row, three of them by knockout, beginning with his biggest fight to date against Fedor Emelianenko. What did Arlovski do? He gradually changed up his philosophy under the tutelage of Greg Jackson and company, where instead of going in for a thumper’s delight, he would key in on more subtler concepts of self-preservation. What was sacrificed in the entertainment sense fed ultimately into his longevity.
(Remarkably, though Arlovski bounced back in a big way after that skid with a five-fight unbeaten streak, he’d suffer two subsequent losing streaks of at least equal length down the stretch — and he’s still going.)
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Reyes didn’t exactly do that. The three wins he’s had since the losing streak have been notable in that he still stands in the pocket and trades, and he still plays the high-risk, high-reward striker’s game of chin roulette. If anything, he has slowed things down in his favor. He sees things, he says, both in and out of the cage with a little more purpose.
Especially after suffering health scares in his personal life before the spiral began, as he dealt with deep vein thrombosis and the engulfing idea of his own mortality.
“It started with me coming from a place of gratitude after my blood clots,” he says. “The doctor was telling me I was day-to-day, all those things. So, I really looked at my life.”
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Reyes says, though he was always a believer of a certain scale, his faith deepened in a bigger way through that scare, putting the fight game into proper perspective.
“As far as getting my career back on track, that was the first step,” he says. “The second step was trusting everything I’m doing and not looking for somebody else to solve my problem for me. Work hard, work with purpose, and don’t take any shortcuts. There’s no secret formula. There’s no magical team. There’s no magical coach that’s going to get you to find you. What you have is inside of you and nobody can bring it out of you but you.”
Dominick Reyes knocked out Nikita Krylov in a light heavyweight fight at UFC 314 to win his third bout in a row.
(Megan Briggs via Getty Images)
It’s a different Reyes from the taciturn contender who gave Jones such a run for his money. A few years ago, Reyes was training at Glover Teixeira’s gym in Bethel, Connecticut, helping Alex Pereira prep for his middleweight title fight with Israel Adesanya while preparing himself for Spann. I can remember the juxtaposition of demeanors between Pereira and Reyes, as one was emerging as a bonafide star in the UFC, and one was diminishing to the point of no return.
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It was a reminder the fleeting nature of status in the sport.
Of course, that was UFC 281. Pereira won in the biggest moment of his career, and Reyes lost in what was his lowest. After the loss, the conversation of how close Reyes came to beating Jon Jones faded into a distant past, just one of those near-misses that would come to make less and less sense over time.
Yet here we are a couple of years later, and Reyes is still there. If he beats Ulberg for the inside track at a title shot, the Jones fight will come back into the fight game’s conscience. The blood clots will beam like asterisks. The comeback story will become one of the unlikeliest of 2025.
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And that Jones fight, which Reyes — like many in the media — has always contended that he won, will have aged like a fine Nebbiolo.
“And it’s crazy, right?” he says. “Once I accepted, ‘Hey man, me and Jon are trapped in this moment forever, and I can never escape it,’ as much as I want to forget about it or whatever, however I feel about it — we’re trapped in this moment forever. And I have to accept that’s part of my life. That’s part of my journey and my legacy.
“I went out there and I put on the performance of a lifetime against arguably one of the greatest fighters of all time. And I’m proud of that. Regardless of whatever happened. Some people will try to make me feel like I shouldn’t be proud of it. Try to take it away from me. But you could never take that away from me. It’s in here.”
He points to his heart.
“It’s right here. I’ll never forget it. And it’s recorded. So even if I get old and crazy, I’ll never forget it.”
Perhaps none of us should.