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‘I wanted to hang up my gloves in my home town,’ said Brad Pickett, who faces Marlon Vera at UFC Fight Night.
‘I wanted to hang up my gloves in my home town,’ said Brad Pickett, who faces Marlon Vera at UFC Fight Night. Photograph: Scott Heavey/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images
‘I wanted to hang up my gloves in my home town,’ said Brad Pickett, who faces Marlon Vera at UFC Fight Night. Photograph: Scott Heavey/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images

UFC Fight Night: Brad Pickett ready for one last turn in octagon

This article is more than 7 years old
The 38-year-old has no fear before his last fight – against Marlon Vera in London – but the idea of retirement does scare him

Brad Pickett could have been a cordwainer. That was his family business. His parents worked out of a little shop in the East End of London, where they made bespoke shoes for Elton John, among other people. Or he could have struck off into some other line of the fashion business, like his brother. And Pickett did work for Maharishi for a while. He could have been a footballer. He was a good player when he was a kid, signed, for a time, to Rushden & Diamonds. Till his cruciate ligament went. Or a roofer, which is the trade he took up in his 20s, when he was looking for something new to do. There’s no end of things Pickett could have been. And there’s no mistaking what he is. His nose takes two right turns and another left between his brow and his lip. It could only belong to a fighter.

Despite that, people sometimes ask Pickett what he does for a living. And he takes pleasure in telling them, “I’m an ultimate fighter”. It’s much more fun, he says, than almost everyone else’s answer to the same question. And he likes to see how people respond. “I love to break the stereotype.” Everyone in MMA knows who Pickett is, but some of the other people he meets still think of it as a sport for thugs, “Guys on steroids with shaven heads who hit their wives”. Pickett is smart, in both senses. He’s a quick and dapper little man, 5ft 6in, though you can add another couple of inches for the trilby he invariably wears, even on his way to and from the octagon. He says it’s a little tribute to his grandfather, who used to sport one back when he was a bare-knuckle boxer.

Soon, Pickett will give another answer when people ask him what he does. He’s 38, and on Saturday night he’ll fight for the last time. The UFC has matched him against Marlon Vera, two inches taller and 12 years younger. When Vera was a 17-year-old kid living in Ecuador, he used to watch Pickett’s fights on TV, “and I was like, holy shit, this guy is good”. Pickett was supposed to fight Henry Briones, but he pulled out injured. He doesn’t much mind. This time it was more about where, not who, he fought. “I wanted to hang up my gloves in my home town,” he says, “where it all started.” He’s trying to enjoy his last turn around the circus. So he brought his dog, a cavapoo called Bonnie, along with him to the weigh-in.

Pickett was an amateur boxer for a while, but fell in love with MMA the first time he tried it. “First of all I was like, what’s this all about? Dudes rolling on the floor with each other?” But then he was tied up in knots by a 16-year-old at his first training session. “I was a 26-year-old man, and he was manhandling me,” he says. “I was a very proud person. And I just thought, I cannot have someone out there being able to do this to me.” So he set himself to learning “the decathlon of martial arts”. He first fought in 2004 in a show at the end of the South Parade Pier in Portsmouth. “It was in a ring in a small bar, filled with cigarette smoke.” They paid him with a ring-side table for his family and friends. “But I was never in the sport for money,” he says. “I was in the sport to see how far I could go.”

Which was fortunate, because Pickett went a long way without earning very much. “When I started it was a hobby. You took a fight where you could find it. It wasn’t a legitimate career in the way it is now, where a young aspiring athlete can look at it and say, this is what I want to be when I grow up.” He used to borrow money off his wife, Sarah, so he could cover his costs. “I met him when he was earning a couple of hundred quid a fight,” she says. It was a bit of a shock to her family. “My mum and dad hoped I’d end up with a doctor or lawyer, and I came home and said I was dating a cockney cage fighter.” They put off having kids because he didn’t want to leave her at home alone, having to support them. “I’d feel a right arsehole,” he says, “look after the kid, I’m going to America to train.”

Pickett finally made it to the UFC in 2011, when it took over the promoter he was signed with at the time. He won the “fight of the night” bonus four times in his first six bouts, and another for “knockout of the night” in a fifth. He wanted a title shot, “but kept falling over at the final hurdle.” Somewhere along the way, his feelings about it all changed. “I was driven by competition. Trying to be the best in the world. And when it gets to the stage where I feel like I’m doing it for money, where it becomes your job, it takes away that hunger.” He finally decided he was done after he lost in Manchester last year. “I’ve lost fights before, but not like this. I got hurt straight away. And I knew then that I wanted to close the book.”

They have a boy now, Buddy, 18 months old. Pickett has started to think about his health. His body hurts. Every day. He tugs off his hat, flicks his head this way and that, and his bones click together twice, loudly, as if he was snapping his fingers. “People ask me all the time about whether I’d want Buddy to fight,” he says. “Well, if he’s got a passion for it. Yes. If he has a passion for ballet dancing, I’ll support him in that too.” Sarah is less sure. “I don’t think I can answer that. I’ve seen the struggle Brad’s colleagues go through trying to get to the big show. It’s not an easy road to go down.”

For Pickett, quitting sometimes seems harder still. He’s not a man who frightens easily, but the idea of retirement scares him. “He’s been battling some demons,” Sarah says. “Part of him is saying he should quit, the other part loves it so much he doesn’t want to. And he’s walking away from a job that earned him good money. So there’s that worry too. What am I going to do after?” He says he wants to open a gym down in south London. But first, he’ll take one last turn in the octagon, a final chapter in this fighting life.

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