Issue 200

December 2023

Few fighters have experienced a rise to prominence quite like Paddy Pimblett. But, despite his larger-than-life personality, “The Baddy” remains tied to his home city. Cage Warriors commentator Brad Wharton has followed Pimblett’s rise from close quarters, and lifts the lid on the Scouse star for Fighters Only.

Paddy Pimblett is a star. He’s yet to win a UFC title like Leon Edwards, or enter the Hall of Fame alongside Michael Bisping, but he’s achieved things at the tender age of 28 that many of those who came before him could only have dreamed of. All of which begs the question: How do you quantify transcendence? What’s the difference between a great fighter (of which there are many) and somebody who is legitimately bigger than the sum of their parts (of which there are few)? 

Thankfully there’s a reliable measure of success when it comes to one of our own bursting through that infamous glass ceiling from “MMA famous” to “getting stopped in the street famous.” It doesn’t involve wins, losses, or sales charts, nor does it take into consideration the myriad of other intangibles that we, the hardcore faithful, spend a frankly unhealthy amount of time pouring over when it comes to anointing our idols. 

It’s called the Taxi Driver Test; it’s as simple as it is infallible and Paddy “The Baddy” Pimblett passed it years ago, with flying colors. 

Having followed Paddy’s career for longer than I care to remember, it feels in equal parts like he’s been around both forever, and just a hot minute. It’s crazy to think that it’s been over half a decade since he passed the Taxi Driver Test, but time really does fly when you’re having fun, and riding “The Baddy’s” bandwagon has been nothing if not that.

Usually, passing the Taxi Driver Test comes deep into a fighter’s UFC career when they’re headlining Fight Nights or knocking on the door of world rankings and title opportunities. But for a young lad from Huyton, it came much sooner. 

There aren’t many better feelings after spending four hours in the confines of a stuffy train carriage than emerging into the brisk night air of a city as vibrant as Liverpool. Stepping out onto the cascading grey concrete steps on a late March evening in 2017, though, I found myself face-to-face with more than just a bustling city center. It was a sight that I’m not ashamed to admit put a smile on my face that would have made a Cheshire Cat look miserable by comparison. Maybe 30 feet high and half a block wide, millions of LEDs bleeding into the darkness of the metropolitan night. The very epitome of having your name in lights. 

“Cage Warriors 82: Paddy Pimblett vs. Nad Narimani” 

Outside of the Premier League, there aren’t many lads in their early 20s who can say they’ve had their own billboard looming out over the place they call home. Passers-by literally had no choice but to look up to “The Baddy,” but a quick dose of the city made it clear that they were doing so in much more than the literal sense. 

If you think of a city as a living, breathing organism, then its taxi drivers are the white blood cells; constantly on the move, transporting bits of the genetic code from here to there, filling in the gaps, passing on the knowledge, evolving the culture. Every cab that crisscrossed the city center zipped past that billboard. Every cabbie queueing in the rush hour ranks outside Lime Street had it fill their windscreen. 

And so, that week in Liverpool, every driver of every taxi had a story to tell about “The Baddy.” They’d all driven him, or his neighbor, or his uncle’s sister’s father’s cousin. Their daughter had served him in a coffee shop, their wife used cut his hair when he was a nipper. It was the same in the city’s pubs and bars as Saturday night approached. As soon as the big fight at the Echo Arena was brought up, every barfly had a tale to tell. Cabbies, revelers, passers-by; they all wanted to attach themselves to a kid who was, for that weekend at least, Liverpool’s favorite fighting son. 

There were, for obvious reasons, comparisons made to Cage Warriors’ previous transcendent star – Dublin’s Conor McGregor – who was by then at the absolute peak of his fighting prowess and fame. 

By 2017, McGregor had felled featherweight icon Jose Aldo, moved up two divisions to welterweight to split a pair of epic contests with Nate Diaz, captured lightweight gold from Eddie Alvarez in his most complete Octagon performance, and was all set for an almost unfathomable superfight with boxing legend Floyd Mayweather. McGregor too had been a Cage Warriors champion with a rabid, cult-like following and a groundswell of hometown support. But, as the old cliché goes, there are levels to this game. 

Ten thousand Irish MMA fans will tell you that they were inside Dublin’s Helix Theatre on New Year’s Eve 2012 when “The Notorious” first became a two-weight champion. But in reality, the venue holds just a shade over 1,800 people. By contrast, over six thousand were packed into the Echo at the peak of Paddy’s popularity. We called it “Paddy’s House Party,” because that’s ultimately what it was. The atmosphere was so far removed from that of a standard European MMA show as to be almost unrecognizable. “Paddy’s House Party” wasn’t just a fight, it was a night out, and all of Liverpool was invited. 

As showtime rolled around, the mood fell somewhere between a world title fight and a rave, especially when the time came for his now-signature walkout. Tiesto’s “Lethal Industry” let the crowd know that Paddy was coming. A-Trak’s remix of the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs’ “Heads Will Roll” got them out of their seats as he burst through the curtains and into the arena. Basement Jaxx’s “Where’s Your Head At?” sent them into raptures. Videos of his walkout went viral, shared by fans and media alike – not just in the UK, but the world over.

So, how did a kid from Huyton become one of the most talked-about prospects in the sport before he was a blip on the UFC’s radar? If there’s anything Pimblett can do as well as (if not better than) fighting, it’s connecting with his audience. 

In 2023 that audience is global, but back then, it was Liverpool. When Paddy made his first forays into the sport as an amateur, the sport was in a very different place. In the early 2010’s MMA was barrelling into what was then the peak of its prosperity, on the back of Brock Lesnar’s ceiling-shattering pay-per-view numbers, the emergence of crossover stars like Kimbo Slice and Ronda Rousey and, in the UK, Michael Bisping’s elevation to UFC main event status. 

While the sport was enjoying its highest highs internationally, the domestic scene was still very much a spit-and-sawdust affair. Reputable promoters and officials were busy molding some semblance of order from the chaotic days of only finding out who you were fighting, and under what rules, when you arrived at the arena. In the midst of it all was a brash, cocky teenager who didn’t particularly care about any of the above. Patrick Pimblett just wanted to fight, and he was pretty good at it. 

Pretty good is probably an understatement; he was beating up adults as a literal child and if you’re not convinced by the rhetoric, put yourself in the shoes of your teenage self. Imagine being locked in a cage with a fully-grown man and consider how you’d react. It’s called the “fight or flight” response for a reason, and Paddy’s only response was to fight. He’d seen Diego Sanchez and Clay Guida tear it up in their infamous main event at The Ultimate Fighter Season 9 Finale, and the spark was lit. Aside from the aforementioned instant classic, Season 9 of TUF had featured an entire team of Brits taking on their American counterparts. For a young Paddy, this was no longer just something on TV, it was something achievable. 

A short while later he’d walk through the doors of Next Generation, the gym he calls home to this day, and into the tutelage of head coach Paul Rimmer. His first fight, a March 2011 scrap against Kieran O’Brian, doesn’t appear on the notable MMA databases, but it took place just a couple of months after Paddy’s 16th birthday. He never looked back; supremely confident in his ability and not afraid to explain that fact to anyone who’d listen, by the time he hit the professional ranks in 2012 there was already a buzz around “The Baddy.” 

That unique relationship with the crowd has been a constant throughout a career spanning over a decade and counting. He is, obviously, great to watch. A unique, unorthodox grappler who can pop a crowd with his mat-based antics in the same way a hard-nosed brawler draws gasps with a big knockout. There’s more to this game than just the fighting, though. The Liverpool faithful has followed Paddy everywhere, from the local shows in the embryonic stages of his career, down to London for his early Cage Warriors fights in Kentish Town, and of course to his fortress at the Echo. 

They picked him up after his first defeat, a shocking submission at the hands of Cameron Else. They were there on the night that the wider MMA world first took notice, as he leapt into a trademark flying triangle to submit fellow prospect Conrad Hayes. 

As he vaulted the cage wall following his sensational comeback victory against Alexis Savvidis at Cage Warriors 90, his ecstatic fans crashed through the barriers to embrace their hero. And then, in a moment that nobody – least of all the befuddled security rushing in to contain the situation – saw coming, they picked up the fallen fencing and put it back together again, apologizing for making a mess. 

Now the army has followed him to the UFC, growing in size to encompass not only the Liverpool faithful who’ve been there from the start and the UK crew that joined along the way, but a truly global audience. 

The connection works both ways. Just as Paddy’s fans and friends have been an ever-present part of his journey, he remains a part of theirs. The circle has stayed small; he’s engaged to the same girl he dated in school, Rimmer remains his head coach, and teammates Adam Ventre and Ellis Hampson, now coaches at Next Generation themselves, are constants in his fight camps. “Big Sister” Molly McCann is never far from his side. Justice for the 97 victims of the Hillsborough disaster featured prominently on his pre-UFC fight kits and he was quick to lead Cage Warriors and UFC crowds in commemorative chants whenever he found his way in front of a microphone. 

In 2022, he famously used his post-fight interview at UFC London to give an impassioned speech about men’s mental health following the suicide of a close friend, and he has detailed his own struggles with depression and anxiety following the immense pressure he felt upon being thrust into stardom at such a young age. 

It resonates because in Paddy, many young men in Liverpool, the UK, and beyond see something of themselves. The hair, the dancing, the wit, the post-fight “scrans” and the vulnerability in talking about personal issues that so many write off as weaknesses; they’re much more relatable qualities than those of a multi-millionaire on a Lamborghini yacht. 

Which isn’t to say that Paddy won’t be driving a Lambo of his own before this journey comes to a close. A seven-figure sponsorship deal with Barstool Sports, something practically unheard of for an MMA fighter of his age, more and more lucrative UFC contracts as his stock continues to rise, and his own business ventures (Paddy’s Baddies, a brand of, ahem, “recreational cigarettes” launched in California) are all part of the empire building. So too is The Baddy Foundation, a charity set up with the help of manager Graham Boylan to help with food poverty and mental health issues in his hometown of Liverpool, and eventually beyond. 

Some may say Paddy is like Marmite – you either love him, or you hate him – but the most successful people in this industry usually are. What is undeniable about “The Baddy,” though, is that while his journey may have taken the boy out of Liverpool, nothing will take Liverpool out of the boy. In an era of manufactured celebrity that changes so many, so easily, Patrick Pimblett is still the same lad who wants to train, fight, eat, hang out with his mates, and marry his high school sweetheart. 

He might just be the most grounded star in the sport. And if you don’t believe me, next time you’re in Liverpool, just ask a taxi driver.