Dominick Reyes has turned his career around in incredible fashion.
Reyes (14-4 MMA, 8-4 UFC) was undefeated when he challenged Jon Jones for the light heavyweight title at UFC 247 in February 2020. He pushed Jones to the brink but ended up losing a controversial decision.
Unfortunately for Reyes, it all went downhill from there. He went onto lose his next three fights in a row by knockout, but despite the hardship, he never contemplated walking away. Reyes had a moment of realization after regretting making some unnecessary changes.
“It was just me getting my sh*t together,” Reyes said on the “Pound 4 Pound” podcast. “I’d never lost at all ever in MMA, my whole career. Some guys get in the UFC, they’ll lose their first couple or win a couple, lose a couple, and then get on a streak or whatever. I was streaking the whole time. So when I came out and I lost this decision to Jon, I tried to make changes that I didn’t need to make. I changed my team. Like, why did you change your team, you know? I tried to change my style to be more sitting in the pocket and just throwing hands. I need more power. I tried to figure out why I lost that fight.
“I tried to figure out why I didn’t knock out Jon because I hit him pretty f*cking clean a bunch of times, and I’m like, ‘I just didn’t have enough power.’ So I tried to change my style, to stand in the pocket more, whole new coaches, whole new team, and that f*cked me up. You change everything and you already have it, and you’re changing it. Why? It took a little bit of a self-discovery journey. I went and trained with (Alex) Pereira and Glover (Teixeira) for the (Ryan) Spann fight. That whole thing was another situation where I was trying to find myself. After that fight, I was like, you know what, man? I need to stop all this bull crap. I need to just get back to the work, get back to exactly what I was doing.”
Reyes has since snapped his four-fight losing skid by scoring three-straight knockouts of Dustin Jacoby, Anthony Smith, and most recently Nikita Krylov at UFC 314. He finds himself on the brink of title contention again when he takes on streaking contender Carlos Ulberg (12-1 MMA, 8-1 UFC) in the UFC Perth main event Sept. 27 at RAC Arena in Western Australia.
