On Dominick Reyes and Career Turnarounds

When a terrible decision is announced after a world title fight, you can usually convince yourself that it will not matter because better things are to come for the wronged fighter. With Dominick Reyes, that seemed a safe bet. To perform so well against the great Jon Jones, so early on in his MMA career, he must have been destined for more. It was easy to tell yourself that with a performance like that, the decision would be a minor stumble in the long arc of Reyes’ career, but the sad truth is that for many fighters a single great performance as the underdog will be the pinnacle of their accomplishments in the fight game. As Reyes rattled off three knockout losses over two years, and then disappeared for another two years, things were looking bleak. Then in 2024 he returned and rapidly put together a streak of three knockout victories that has him on the cusp of another title shot. 

Whether Dominick Reyes has improved as a fighter, I cannot really tell you. He does the same couple of things he always did—a southpaw open side counter, and some hard left kicks—and he gets hit just as much as ever. It would be easy to look at his three-fight winning streak and scoff because the light heavyweight division is in a terrible state, and Anthony Smith and Nikita Krylov are not stellar wins in 2025. They certainly aren’t Jiri Prochazka and Jan Blachowicz.  

Yet if you have watched any combat sport for more than a couple of years you know that there is more to this than new techniques and strategies. Even “shoring up the defence” can be less important than a fighter simply finding their confidence. The quality of Reyes’ opposition might not tell us that he can beat the few truly elite light heavyweights, but it might convince Reyes, and that is more than half the battle.

Today, as I do not have much to write about the tactical aspects of the Dominick Reyesurgeance, I thought we could examine a few of the great Lazarus stories of combat sports and try to put our finger on some of the factors that made each possible.

On Confidence

Charles Oliveira is one of the great career turnarounds in mixed martial arts. There was never a point where he was a bad fighter, but he was a solved problem who was adrift in the middle of two of the UFC’s deepest divisions for a while. Getting stopped by Donald Cerrone and Cub Swanson, and roughed up by the light-hitting Frankie Edgar, it seemed like a shoddy chin, flappy striking and limited wrestling were going to hold Oliveira back. He even went down to featherweight, in hopes of outmuscling opponents where his wrestling technique fell short, and gassed horribly while bum rushing Ricardo Lamas and Anthony Pettis.

It was a soft reset of Oliveira’s UFC career that seemed to make the difference. A man who had been fighting known, relevant opponents for the past seven years suddenly got a step back. An old Clay Guida and Jim Miller, the middling Christos Yagos, David Teymur and Nik Lentz (who had already beaten up twice.)  None of them bad fighters, but none of them killers. Oliveira’s striking and wrestling came on in ways that they had not improved in years and that might have been for a hundred reasons, but a large part of it seems to be the old boxing knowledge that it is hard to try new things and learn when you are fighting someone just as dangerous as you in every fight. Stopping David Teymur with a Ong Bak stepping back-elbow might have done more for Oliveira’s self belief than hard fought wins over legitimate greats like Dustin Poirier and Justin Gaethje.  

Marlon Vera had a similar patch of rapid improvement when he went from losing to the legitimately elite John Lineker to running up his highlight reel against Wuliji Buren, Guido Cannetti, Frankie Saenz, Nohelin Hernandez and Andre Ewell.

In recent years there might be no better example of a fighter regaining his confidence than Taiga Kawabe. I wrote about Taiga in my last Three Strikers You Should Be Studying article, but the pertinent information is this: from 2017 to 2020 he went 1-8-1 in the kickboxing ring. He had held a K-1 title a few years earlier, he fought in the finals of a K-1 Grand Prix, he had fought Takeru twice. He was still young but everything suggested he had peaked early and burned out. Then he took a couple of steps back. He fought a few of no-namers for RIZIN, then lost one to Kan Nakamura, and then he beat the well regarded Muay Thai fighter Genji Umeno. Five more fights, four wins and a draw, and suddenly he was in a title fight against the RISE champion, Lee Chanhyung.

The Cinderella man aspect added to the drama, but Taiga fought the bout of his life against Lee and dominated Lee to a decision victory. He defended his belt one more time, looking sensational, and then retired from kickboxing to pursue more money in MMA, a sport in which he currently holds a 0-2 record. That is sort of a sad ending to such a great tale, but then coming back from 0-2 is nothing when you have come back from 1-8-1. 

On Money

In boxing there are two very high profile examples of career turnarounds where middling fighters won the heavyweight championship of the world. James Braddock was a decently talented light heavyweight, who due to hand injuries and the collapse of the global economy, was forced to turn to manual labour to feed his family. The important note, of course is that Braddock did not hang up his gloves out of respect for his record and simply work a nine-to-five while reminiscing about the good old days. No, boxing was an extra income stream. So Braddock went to lug goods on the docks every day, then some nights he would take a fight for a few dollars, overworked and undertrained.  

Braddock fought for the world light heavyweight title against the great Tommy Loughran (who we studied in Advanced Striking 2.0) in July 1929. Three months later the Wall Street Crash happened and Braddock fought twenty-three recorded matches between October 1929 and January 1933. He lost the majority of those fights. Then through 1933 he received some financial backing and began to train seriously for a “comeback” to a sport that he had not really left. In 1934 he won the heavyweight title from Max Baer in one of the greatest upsets in boxing history.

This writer’s favourite fighter, Jersey Joe Walcott had a similar story. He was an enormously talented young fighter, who suffered an injury, and was in the unfortunate position of having a large family relying on him when the Great Depression arrived. Walcott, like Braddock, had retired from training but continued fighting, running up losses on his once impressive record.  It was through the arrival of Felix Borrachichio, a businessman / mob member who was willing to pay Walcott to not go to work, and to train instead, that Walcott was able to get his career back on track and eventually win the world heavyweight title on his fourth attempt.

A less cinematic example is that of Kirino Garcia. He went 0-17 to start his professional career, but wound up taking decent world champions to decisions. A lot of that was due to circumstances that are not noted in the margins of his Boxrec record. Garcia was smuggled across the Mexican border by coyotes, who then used him to earn a few dollars getting knocked out by genuine prospects. His first fight was a quick knockout loss to future cruiserweight world title challenger, Bobby Gunn. Garcia was often starving by the time he got into the ring, and refused to train due to his pride in being a “street fighter.” A promoter finally took interest in him and forced him into the gym, and though Kirino was not the best boxer, his toughness and power were finally able to shine through.  He ran his record up from 0-17 to 22-18-1 and won some minor titles. More importantly he was able to build a home and a life for his wife and children with the larger purses he was finally receiving.

On Skill

Jack Dempsey, who spent time as a hobo traveling across America, used to talk about his unrecorded fights and remark that he was often so hungry—not in terms of sporting desire but rather for basic sustenance—that he would have let the opponent hit him in the head with a sledgehammer. But removal of that hunger, taking the boot off the throat just a little, was what allowed Braddock and Walcott and countless others to bring it all together and find success.

A third consideration is the acquisition of skill. It is impossible to remove this completely from the idea of confidence, because someone like Charles Oliveira got his confidence styling on journeymen, and then was striking and wrestling far more proficiently with world class opponents when he returned to the rankings. But there are fighters who have made drastic strides in their skillsets even while failing in the ring.

The perfect example might be Mark Hunt. Hunt won a K-1 Grand Prix (by losing in a brawl that was so injurious to his opponent that he got into the final anyway) and got the invite to PRIDE FC. He was a fun heavyweight, but horribly flawed the moment his opponent attempted to grapple, and when his contract was bought up in the UFC’s acquisition of PRIDE FC the UFC offered to buy him out rather than give him a fight. Hunt’s run heading into his UFC debut was pretty dreadful: losing to middleweights Melvin Manhoef and Gegard Mousasi back-to-back. But in spite of this, he insisted on the UFC honouring his contract and made his UFC debut against Sean McCorkle, who easily manhandled just as most fans expected.

Hunt’s transformation over the next few fights was remarkable. In his very next bout he met Chris Tuchscherer, a teammate of Brock Lesnar and an accomplished wrestler. In what should have been a nightmare match up he fought off the takedowns and punished Tuchscherer with powerful, patiently delivered counter punches. A couple of fights later, Hunt met Cheick Kongo. Kongo was not a D-1 wrestler, but he had a masters degree in grinding against the cage. The moment Kongo got to the clinch with Hunt and Hunt dug an underhook, posted his head and even hit a little trip to break the clinch, panic began to show in Kongo.  

Kongo started lunging in with long, easily countered blows and Hunt obliged him with a counter left hook. A TKO followed shortly after.

The wrestling was obviously improved, but the striking was patient and far better built for mixed martial arts than what he had shown previously. Yet even if it seemed to happen overnight, it was a longer project. Hunt was a recovering drug addict who had found success fighting in K-1 even while taking herculean amounts of meth. The McCorkle fight was the first he had seriously trained towards in a long while. Hunt had moved his training camp to American Top Team ahead of the McCorkle fight and despite losing that one fast, he was convinced that he was “the best fighter I’d been in years.” And that move to American Top Team was building off a success he felt he had by moving his training camp overseas while competing in DREAM—where his results had been disastrous.   

It is hard to imagine a better solution to Hunt’s problems that what American Top Team were able to do in reinventing him. They saved his career and ultimately made him into a top ten UFC heavyweight and a star for the promotion, even as Hunt and the UFC continued to have a tense relationship. And where often confidence is built through victories and successes, Hunt’s confidence came from a sort of stubborn humility. He was embarrassed by the way his DREAM and later K-1 fights had gone, and he realized he had to make a change, but he was stubborn enough to not give up on the idea of training overseas and at ATT when it did not yield immediate results.

Robbie Lawler’s renaissance felt as though he had received the Mandate of Heaven. It was nonsensical that a grizzled old veteran like Robbie Lawler, completely stuck in his ways, could finally fix the holes in his game so late in the day. He had been a talented young man, who was worked out, went up in weight to try to hide it, and was earning a comfortable living as a knockout artist who would never touch a major title.

Lawler is another fighter who was saved by American Top Team, and improvements in his grappling were a huge part of that. But Lawler also claimed he had not sparred regularly in six years leading up to the move. We examined this at great length in Robbie Lawler: Rebirth and Retirement.

Hayato Sakurai was at one point the pound-for-pound number one fighter in the world. He lost his Shooto belt to a young Anderson Silva, and then lost in a welterweight championship fight with Matt Hughes in the UFC. Sakurai was recruited by PRIDE FC when they began to showcase lighter weight talent. Sakurai suffered a few losses and even tried to move up to middleweight, getting finished by Crosley Gracie. His response was to make two drastic changes at the same time: he would cut to lightweight, and he would move his camp to the US to train with Matt Hume at AMC Pankration.

Before Matt Hume was the Vice President of the extremely sketchy ONE Championship, and the coach of Demetrious Johnson and Bibiano Fernandes, before his first great charge Rich Franklin had even won the UFC title, Hume helped reignite the magic of Hayato Sakurai. It still took time for the new skills to shine through though. Sakurai’s first fight under Hume was a slog against Milton Vieira. He ground his way to a split decision. And then another relatively uneventful decision against Shinya Aoki in Shooto.

Sakurai had always been a talented grappler—he scored the fastest submission at ADCC 1999 and got second place in the absolute division.

But his striking had often let him down. He had thunderous low kicks but no set ups, and a great left hook but no real boxing game to slot it into. Under Hume he developed combinations that built into each other and made the best of his strengths. Even in his late career, Sakurai’s head-body-legs combos, ending in a double collar tie and a knee to the face, would move Bas Rutten to ecstasy on commentary. Those were the days of drinking whenever Rutten exclaimed “liver shot,” and you would end Sakurai fights much worse for wear.

Four months after Sakurai’s lightweight debut, the PRIDE lightweight grand prix began. Sakurai stopped the former UFC champion, Jens Pulver in the first round, and then put some terrific shots on the insanely durable former Shooto champion, Joachim Hansen in the same night.

In many ways looking back at those additions to Sakurai’s game, he looks like a prototype for Demetrious Johnson with his deft combination striking and clinch work into knees. Albeit with a few eccentricities like the enormous judo throws and exciting guard game.

Sakurai was never able to become the best lightweight in the world, he lost to Takanori Gomi in the tournament final, but his career had astonishing longevity for a fighter who had originally been so reliant on his physicality. He was able to continue fighting and winning in impressive fashion for another decade as a staple of Japanese shows.

A final example in which improved confidence, improved financial situation, and skill acquisition all created a tremendous transformation is Steve Robinson. In 1993 the WBO’s relatively new featherweight belt was thrown into turmoil as champion, Ruben Palacios tested positive for HIV just days before he was due to defend his belt. Robinson was a 13-9-1 journeyman when he got the call to fight John Davison on two days notice. Despite rapidly sweating out eight pounds between the phone call and the weigh in, Robinson was able to take the decision victory.

Robinson defended the belt seven times and despite never looking like the greatest featherweight in the world, he improved in leaps and bounds. He always lacked head movement and looked a little robotic on the outside, and even in tight he was not a thunderous hitter, but he was a respectable puncher with great form who could throw the same decently powerful shots, fifty times a round, for twelve rounds.

Robinson is now mainly a footnote on the career of Naseem Hamed. Hamed defeated him for the WBO belt in 1997, in a masterclass that Brendan Ingle declared to be the best demonstration of the five stances he taught his students—orthodox and southpaw, bladed and square, and feet level. Hamed did his job to legitimize the WBO belt, defending it sixteen times. But Naz was a generational talent, picked out for success from an early age with promoters and managers lining up behind him. Steve Robinson was working in the warehouse behind Debenhams and only got a whiff of the title because the promoters were desperate, and where Hamed ultimately squandered his incredible skill and opportunities, Robinson capitalized fully on the first real chance fighting gave him.