Issue 212

December 2024

Ian Machado Garry is entering the new year as one of the biggest names in the sport, and he spoke exclusively to Fighters Only’s Paul Browne about his plans for world domination over the next twelve months.

As the final curtain fell on 2024, few fighters will have had cause to feel happier with their body of work over the preceding twelve months than Ian Machado Garry. ‘The Future’ began the year under challenging circumstances. Late 2023 saw the young Irishman and his family become the subject of a bizarre social media witch hunt, and many reveled in his persecution.

Two decision victories over Geoff Neal and Michael Page continued his progression up the rankings. However, when he stepped up at short notice to face Shavkat Rakhmonov at UFC 310, he lost by decision but gained a lot of respect. His performance left everybody in no doubt that Garry is a world-class talent in the sport’s most competitive division.

ADOPTING A GROWTH MINDSET

When he arrived in the UFC, Garry was regarded as an exciting technical striker. He has since shown exceptional development in all areas of his game. 

“That was the entire reason I went to train at Kill Cliff in Florida,” says Garry. “When you look at it on paper, it's arguable that Kill Cliff is the greatest gym in the world for a welterweight. Just after I won my world title in Cage Warriors (in 2021), I was in Costa Rica with my wife, going over my first UFC contract. We’re at this cocktail bar up this mountain in the middle of nowhere having a fruit juice, and we're going over all this. My wife turns to me and says, 'If you could list five gyms you'd want to go to, write down those five gyms.' Then I said, 'I don't want to write down five. I'll write down one. I know where I want to go. I know where there's a heap of welterweights that I can go and train with and learn from and it's Kill Cliff in Florida.”

THE BEST OF THE BEST

He attributes this growth to the knowledge he has sought in some of the best training environments in the world.

“I've always wanted to work with some of the boys there,” he says about Kill Cliff. “I've always been a massive fan of Gilbert Burns, for example, who I can now say is one of my very close friends. I've always wanted to go train with people like him and test myself, and I've always wanted to work with someone who's created multiple champions in the UFC and Bellator across all of mixed martial arts. So, I sent (Kill Cliff coach) Henry Hooft a message, and I said, ‘I would like to come out and train,’ and he said, 'Hey, no problem. Let's do a two-week trial. See how everything goes.' It was evident after about two days that energies were good between me and the team, and then I ended up training there. And some of the names I was training with were unbelievable.

“Gilbert Burns was top five in the UFC, Vincente Luque was top 10. You had Kevin Lee, you had (former Bellator champion) Jason Jackson. Those guys, all world-class welterweights. I also trained a lot with (UFC lightweight) Michael Johnson. He was one of my favorite training partners. You’ve got so many good guys. André Fialho, Gregory “Robocop” Rodriguez, Shavkat Rakhmonov. So many elite-level guys to learn from, so it was a phenomenal experience for me at a young point in my career when I had just reached the UFC, to be able to train and prepare with these fighters and see how they do it and it taught me a lot of things that they do right and wrong.

STEEP LEARNING CURVE

“I feel like Kill Cliff was somewhere that I pushed myself so much because I went in and just got grinded out by some of the best welterweights, middleweights, and lightweights on the planet, and I learned very quickly that I don't give up, and that the more someone beats me up, the more I fight back, and that was a great thing to mentally learn about myself, and I'm someone who learns so fast. You can ask anyone I've ever trained with. They will tell you I learn so fast because it's one of my biggest skills. You show me something, I do it. I remember it, and I go off on my own little map on it, and I figure out my questions, my answers.

“I got ground out there by some of the best fighters in the world. I worked hard there every day until I got better and better and better. And then it started to change. You see this kid who came in and was struggling for a couple months. All of a sudden, this kid's starting to dominate and find ways to beat people. And he's learning still. It was so important for me and my career to understand where am I talented and where am I lacking. Where do I need to focus and improve on? The Kill Cliff guys gave me a realistic look at where my trajectory needs to go to become the best version of me that I can possibly be. That was why I wanted to go there. I wanted to go there to push myself, test myself, learn about myself, and grow. Tick every single box. And that's where I learned a lot about myself. And then I took from that what I needed to. I travel the world, and I get what I need from people I believe who can help me be better. And I grow and evolve and make sure that my game is just every step fundamentally improving and combining and cinching it all together to be the perfect martial artist. And that's my goal”.

EMBRACING BRAZILIAN JIU-JITSU

The next stage of Garry’s nomadic journey took him to Academia Chute Boxe in Sao Paulo, Brazil, to work with two of the greatest grapplers in UFC history, Demian Maia and Charles Oliveira. 

“My grappling was something that I noticed I needed to work on because in Kill Cliff, I was getting taken down,” he explains. “I'm training with (former Bellator champion) Logan Storley, who's a three-time NCAA champion. I'm training with Kevin Lee, who we've seen is a phenomenal wrestler. I'm training with Gilbert Burns, who's a jiu-jitsu world champion. I'm training with all of these phenomenal grapplers, and we don't have wrestling like that in Europe. We just don't. It's different. So, I'm learning, right?

“If I'm going to go against these guys in the UFC, they're going to try to take me down, they're going to try to suffocate me, and they're going to try to make it a boring fight for me. What's the best way that I can counteract that? And I thought, 'I can be a backwards Charles Oliveira.’ And the reason I said ‘backwards’ is because I've watched fights where Charles has been knocked down, and people step back and say, 'Stand back up!' What a superpower! I knock you down. I have success. Boom, crack you. Do I follow you down? People are like, 'Nah, I'm all right.' Stand back up, please. I don't want to risk it. That's a superpower.” 

SEARCHING FOR ZERO WEAKNESSES

“If I could flip that and be like, 'Well, I know people aren't going to want to stay on the feet with me.' My striking is superior. People are always going to try to take me to the ground, which means if I focus on jiu-jitsu, I'm either going to wrap your neck up, or I'm going to be able to stand back up. Either way, I'm back to where I want to be and where you don't want to be. So that was my thinking behind relocating to Brazil, and then when I thought about Charles and his team and the energy of Chute Boxe, which is magnificent and special and beautiful, and I'm very proud to call them a team now. I also get to train with the most fundamentally sound jiu-jitsu practitioner we've ever seen on the face of the earth at MMA, and that's Demian Maia, so it's an absolute honor, it's a pleasure, and it's a privilege. And I love where my growth, my journey, and my travel has taken me, and I'm excited for the rest of it.”

Photo credit: The Future Productions - Curtis Pyke

GRAPPLING UPGRADES

The evolution in Garry’s grappling skills was evident in his victory over Michael ‘Venom’ Page and in his defeat to Shavkat Rakhmonov. 

“Head position,” he replies when asked if he had spoken to Demian Maia or Charles Oliveira since the Rakhmonov about what he could have done differently. “My head position was the key difference. Damien and I spoke about it when I went to his seminar in the UK this week. Charles and I had a discussion about how, instead of going palm-to-palm and pulling and cranking my elbow to tighten the choke, I can grab my wrist or my own glove (which is allowed), and I can really torque and then pull. So, I tried these, obviously, it was across the chin, not under the chin. And that shows essentially how tough Shavkat is. I have no problem shattering all of Shavkat’s teeth in that fight (and trust me, I was trying), but what I did was once I got my arm across, I was trying to go to the rear naked choke. And I found that the lock between my gloves and my hand in that position just wasn't correct. It was my head position because I ended up with my chin sitting on top of his head instead of being ear-to-ear. So, it's essentially what we came up with. And it's frustrating to think that all I had to do was put my head beside his, and I choke him.”

ADULATION FROM FANS

Despite suffering defeat for the first time in his professional career, Garry emerged from UFC 310, having earned the respect of fight fans but remains focused on chasing the UFC welterweight title.

“For me, when I think of love and hate,” he ponders, “I can't focus on either because if I allow either of them to change the way I feel or how I operate, then it's a never-ending spiral. The fans love me. They hate me. I focus. It's just something I don't pay attention to. I don't give value to the love, and I don't give value to the joy. I focus on my goal, and my goal is to be one of the greatest to ever do it, and I don't mind whether people love me, or people hate me. I'm going to be a champion whether they like it or not, that's my focus.

“I focus on the people I surround myself with, the people that eat at my table, the people that are in my corner, the people that I train with every day, the people that care about me. The love from the fans is lovely, and it's great to see. But I can't give it attention because, in the same breath, if you see the love and then it disappears, and it turns to hate, it will affect you. So, I focus on the people that matter to me most in life. I focus on that because that is what really, really matters to me.

“I've always said this: I've never wanted to be famous. Never, that's not something I've ever wanted. Is it cool? Yeah, it's pretty cool, but I look at it from this point of view: people recognize me out of respect for the talent and the skills that I possess. That is all I want. I want people to understand and know that I am a phenomenally talented athlete. I'm one of the greatest fighters that the welterweight division has seen and will ever see throughout history, and I'm going to prove that. And whether they see it now or they don't doesn’t matter. They'll see it when I'm finished. And when I'm finished, I only want to be able to sit there and say that Ian Machado Garry was one of the greatest to ever do it. Whatever happens now is irrelevant in my mind. It's great to see they're all coming around and understanding the skill I possess. But I know how good I am, and I'm focusing on that, and I'm focusing on getting a world title. That's my main goal”.

A MASSIVE YEAR AWAITS

“I always strive to get three fights a year, every year,” says Garry when asked what 2025 will look like for him. “That is my goal, to be a consistently active fighter. I believe that’s something that a lot of UFC athletes don't comprehend. The more you compete, the better you feel. The more you compete, the more you understand the fight week protocols of media, and not just the stress but the full-on effect of a fight week on a pay-per-view card. It's very full-on. It's a lot of hours and hours and hours of media and interviews, and it can be quite exhausting to a certain extent but it's a build-up. The whole point is you're trying, you're entertaining, you're trying to sell a fight. You're doing these interviews to get eyes on you. To get people to watch you fight so, it's a build-up. The more you do it, the more comfortable you become in that fight. And the more comfortable you become in that build-up and understand the way ‘fight week’ operates, the better you can go out and compete on Saturday night. So, I feel like it's something that's massively underrated in the UFC. However, I do not misunderstand it.” 

BIG MATCH TEMPERAMENT

“I thrive under the bright lights; I thrive in those big moments,” he says about the pressure. “And that ‘fight week’ elevates me, and brings my energy up, and gets me excited. So, as always, it'll be three fights in 2025, but I believe one thing I can do to become the best fighter I possibly can be going into 2025 is to give myself a period of time where I go out and focus on all of the little things that I need to improve on to fully prepare myself to dominate as a world champion. What I mean by that is that I've now had two fights where I should have finished Shavkat Rakhmonov and Michael Page with a rear naked choke. I need to go down that rabbit hole, and I need to learn finishing in that position. I need to understand every single which way to do it. I need to do palm-to-palm, I need to do the ‘mata leao’ the ‘maia leao’, I need to be able to switch to an armbar, switch to the triangle (both sides), and find a way to finish in that position if I have a chance to do that.

“I need to make sure that I know every single avenue three steps before someone's going to do it. On the feet I need to flow and be free and get my hands off a bit earlier and not necessarily be a bit cautious and patient. I need to take a slight adaptation of that Brazilian Chute Boxe Muay Thai style of getting in my opponent’s face a little bit but also be that phenomenally gifted counter striker so it's constant growth and evolution now. That's my main focus because that's what I deserve. That's what Ian Machado Garry does. I deserve to be the world champion. I know that I can do it. I need that very slight improvement in those positions to be the best I possibly can be. Once I feel satisfied that I am doing all the things I've said I'm doing and I've focused on those little tweaks and little adjustments to make myself that dominant champion, I can finish anyone and go out and do it with ease and style and have fun.

THE YEAR AHEAD

“In 2025, I'm going to fight anyone who stands in my way, I'm going to get my hand raised over and over and over again, and I'm going to win a world title,” he says straight-faced at the thought of it. “I'm going to dominate the division, and I'm going to prove to the world that I'm the best welterweight that the world has ever seen, and I'm going to do it hopefully against Shavkat again, or whoever the number one contender is at that point.

“There is a changing of the welterweight division at the moment where this young wave of talent is starting to come through now. I can list names off. There’s me, Shavkat, Jack Della Maddalena, Leon Edwards, Belal Muhammad, Michael Morales. You've got all of these young contenders who are starting to rise up the rankings and get closer and closer to a world title shot. All of these guys are people that I'm paying attention to and get excited about one day competing against when I have that belt because when I have a title, I plan on domination. I plan on getting that belt and beating every single person, every single style, and I plan on going out there and finishing every single one of them. I believe I’m just a couple of tiny adjustments away from being able to completely dominate the UFC welterweight division for years to come.”