'What's next is a scary thing': The anatomy of an above-average UFC career

Yahoo

05-03-2025

If you were to crunch the numbers on the average stay in the UFC, know what you'd find? Sticking around in the Octagon for more than five consecutive fights puts you in special company. It means you've beaten the odds and had a better than average career with the industry leader.
Most fighters don't make it that far — and that's among the already elite group that even glimpses a UFC contract in the first place. Look at Saturday's UFC 313 event in Las Vegas, for example, and you'll see a fight card where half the fighters have six or fewer UFC bouts to their credit.
And that's for a pay-per-view event, the top tier of the UFC's programming pyramid. At last weekend's UFC Vegas 103 event, 60% of the fighters on the card had fewer than five UFC bouts headed into the night.
This is not a career that lends itself to longevity. We tend to focus on outliers in fight sports. Champions. Repeat contenders. Veterans of multiple bloody battles who seared their names into our collective memories. We don't think too much about what an average career in the UFC really looks like.
Brian Kelleher had 17 fights over seven years with the UFC. His career was, by just about any metric, above average. He competed in two weight classes and won five performance bonuses — most of them for preliminary card bouts.
Still, last week he got the word. With his contract up and a string of losses over the past couple years, Kelleher was informed that his time in the UFC was done. At age 38, it also made him start thinking his time in MMA as whole might be finished, and he wrote as much in a message posted to X last week.
I don't know what's next but it seems fighting has come to an end. What a journey. Thank you all who have supported me. Love you. BOOM
— Brian BOOM Kelleher (@brianboom135) February 26, 2025
Kelleher learned that he was out of the UFC via email, though not from the UFC itself. The news came from Drug Free Sport, which handles sample collections for the UFC anti-doping program. The email informed him that he was no longer subject to the program and would not be visited again by sample collectors from Drug Free Sport.
Kelleher knew what that meant. The next morning, he heard from his manager, who confirmed it.
'I kind of was expecting it a little bit with my age and where I was in my career, coming off a few losses,' Kelleher said. 'I figured it was possible they would give me one more fight. I had done a lot for the company, been with them for seven years, took a lot of short-notice fights as a replacement and I know they liked that. I know [UFC matchmaker] Sean Shelby likes me, and I thought maybe I'd get one more shot at a hometown fight in Long Island or New York or something like that. But unfortunately that wasn't the case.'
This wasn't a surprise to Kelleher. But it's one thing to know, in a hypothetical sense, what's probably coming. It's another thing to have it staring you in the face. Suddenly there was a finality to it. The unmistakable sense that a door in one's life had now swung shut for good.
So that's it. Kelleher is done in the UFC. And he isn't sure what comes after that.
'It's a little bit scary,' he said. 'Just to stop fighting, you know? You get attached to it. That's who you are. For the last 20 years, this is all I've done. I never really wanted to work a regular job, just a nine-to-five job for a paycheck just to survive. I wanted to chase my dream and make it happen. I'm blessed that I got to do that, but I guess I thought I had at least two to three years left.'
Part of it is his because of his neck. Kelleher had a two-level fusion done on his cervical vertebrae after an MRI spotted some damage that UFC doctors were concerned about. He said he opted for the surgery after UFC officials told him he wouldn't be allowed to fight again without it. He'd hoped it would buy him some time and prolong his career.
Now he faces the uncertainty of unemployment in a field where the market for 38-year-old bantamweights is not exactly robust.
Kelleher is open to fighting elsewhere, either in MMA or one of the other combat sports that overlaps with it in the complex Venn diagram of disciplines that's emerged in the last few years. He has a strong social media following and has endeared himself to many hardcore fans that way. In the attention economy of professional fighting, this might be worth something.
But he also doesn't want to fight just to fight, collecting some meager purse to be someone else's stepping stone to the big time. He's seen how that goes. Plus it just delays the question of what comes next rather than answering it. And ultimately the delay might not even be a very long one.
'I've just been feeling like maybe God is looking out for me in a different way,' Kelleher said. 'Like maybe it's all happening naturally and it's time to let it go. It's tough because you're used to waking up and your sole purpose is this. It's just train, eat, sleep, train. It's a very disciplined, regimented lifestyle. You follow that routine for so many years, and there's a lot more to it than people think. Now it's like, OK, I did it. I had a UFC run. That's great. I lived my dream and I am happy about that. But for it to be over and not know what's next is a scary thing, because which direction do I take this now?'
Some retired fighters open gyms. Kelleher has always enjoyed helping younger fighters and sharing his craft, but 'there's not really any money in just training fighters,' he noted. Most of the people who really make a solid go of it as gym owners do so by teaching regular people — not pros. What that often translates to in reality, as retired UFC fighter Charles McCarthy once said, is teaching the same beginner jiu-jitsu lesson over and over again for the rest of your life.
Kelleher isn't sure he wants to do that. So what, does he go get a totally different job? It's been a long time since he had one of those, he said. Not since he decided to go all-in on MMA and pursue this career with everything he had.
'I had a long journey to get here,' Kelleher said. 'A lot of ups and downs. I was never that guy who was undefeated with a quick track to the UFC. I started this as a fan of the sport growing up. When I was 18, a gym opened up near me. I never wrestled in high school or anything. I just got into MMA and started training, thinking I could make this a reality. I lost my first pro fight. Then I won a few, lost a couple in a row. I was 28 years old, had a full-time job. I wasn't sure this was going to work. Then I just said, 'You know, you've got to hit a switch and really go for this, fight all the top prospects, really see where you can go with this.' And looking back, that's probably what I'm most proud of. That resiliency to keep going and chase the dream and make it happen.'
He had some big moments in the UFC. His debut was a short-notice fight against Iuri Alcantara that he took on two weeks' notice. That was his way in. He was willing to take whatever risk was required to get a UFC contract, and it paid off. He walked into Jeunesse Arena in Rio de Janeiro, a hostile crowd chanting 'you're gonna die' at him in Portuguese, and then he beat a ranked Brazilian fighter who'd come into the fight as a nearly 4-to-1 favorite.
Then there was the time he beat former UFC bantamweight champion Renan Barao on network television. He was the underdog there too. Imagine that feeling, to beat a former champ live on FOX so everyone who ever doubted this crazy dream could look up at the TV over the bar one Saturday night and see you getting your hand raised.
All these moments and memories are his to keep. So, too, is the damage he's done to himself along the way — and truth be told, he does wonder what the final bill for that might end up looking like some years down the road.
But he lived the dream for seven grueling, turbulent years. He was a UFC fighter. He had a career. What's that worth to other people, and where does it all go from here? He doesn't know. Maybe he doesn't have to yet. But he knows he wouldn't take it back, even if he could.