Adam Fugitt still remembers the moment his teenage dreams came true.
It was July 30, 2022. At the American Airlines Center in Dallas, Texas, almost 20,000 people packed the arena for one of the most anticipated events of the year: UFC 277.
Ultimate Fighting Championship–or UFC–is the world’s leading Mixed Martial Arts promotion company, bringing in the best fighters from every corner of the globe and every walk of life.
It was a long way from Fugitt’s hometown of Eugene, where he had fallen in love with fighting more than a decade earlier.
After weigh-ins, press conferences and coach pep talks, some of the biggest names in MMA geared up for their fights.
Among the newcomers was Fugitt. At 33, he wasn’t the youngest rookie in the big leagues, but he’d been on a journey to this stage since he was 14.
Before the fight begins, each fighter walks out to the ring–called the octagon for its eight sides, contained by a mesh fence. The crowd cheers them on as they walk, reaching their hands out for high-fives while music blasts from speakers around the arena.
That first walkout was the moment Fugitt realized he had made it.
“That is a moment that I envisioned and thought about and, dare say, I rehearsed as a 16-year-old working at a truck shop in West Eugene,” he said. “I'm sweeping floors and picking up tools and constantly just visualizing myself hitting the curtain, walking out to whatever song was in the music at that time. I had lived that moment 1000 times already.”
From humble blue collar beginnings, to the biggest MMA stage in the world, Fugitt has put in the work to become one of the best fighters in the nation.
Beginnings on the mat
Growing up in his father’s childhood home in Eugene, Fugitt says he was always the hyperactive kid with “too much energy for his own good.”
He played sports, primarily baseball, to channel his energy into activity. But at times, it wasn’t enough.
In middle school, Fugitt remembers watching UFC with his friends when the company was still in its infancy. When they watched a UFC-produced show called The Ultimate Fighter for the first time, Fugitt remembers thinking, “What is this? This is crazy.”
After watching the fights, they would go out to the backyard to wrestle, trying to recreate the moves they saw on TV.
He also grew up watching wrestling, and his mother, Melissa Fugitt, remembers him telling her, “Mama, this is what I wanna do.”
“Oh, no you’re not,” she had responded. Eventually, she came around to the idea.
But when his dad tried to take him to wrestling mat clubs, Fugitt remembers being too nervous to go in.
“With that chaotic energy, I also had some shyness with new spaces,” he remembers. “We'd be out in the parking lot and I would just chicken out. Or we wouldn’t even get to the parking lot. We'd get to the car. Or my Dad, he’d ask me, ‘Are we gonna go today?’, and I would chicken out.”
Finally, in the summer after eighth grade, Fugitt joined a wrestling summer camp with his best friend.
“It was kind of love at first sight,” he says. “I just immediately knew this is where I should have been for a while with sports.”
Getting knocked down–and getting back up
His parents, Nathan and Melissa, remember seeing an immediate increase in confidence once Fugitt found wrestling.
“He would come home and he was just lit up,” Melissa remembers.
The individual aspect of the sport was immediately attractive to Fugitt. Improvement required hard work and patience, values he had learned from watching his parents work.
Fugitt’s father was a warehouse manager for various organizations, while his mother worked her way up to a managerial position at a local credit union. His parents and relatives worked blue collar jobs to support their families, instilling a work ethic in Fugitt that has followed him throughout his career.
After wrestling in high school, Fugitt did one year of college wrestling at Southwestern Oregon Community College in Coos Bay, before deciding not to continue. Fugitt wanted to focus his attention on wrestling more than school.
And, he had just torn his meniscus, a piece of cartilage that protects the knee.
That’s when his father, Nathan Fugitt, sat him down and told him to consider his options. For Fugitt, there was only one: fighting.
While his parents supported the choice, Fugitt says they didn’t always understand his affinity for fighting. It’s hard for them to watch their son get hurt.
The first time he got knocked down in a fight, his dad was in the audience.
“He left his seat. He was all the way in the back row, and then he's up in the corner, couldn't control himself. He had to be there,” Fugitt remembers, laughing to himself. “He was about ready to jump in.”
Fugitt says he understands the fear and worry his parents have dealt with throughout his career. Some people don’t understand why people like Fugitt choose to fight.
“They look at the sports that we do, the combat sports, for any of them that look at it and go, ‘What the heck is wrong with those people?’” Fugitt says. “Just know, it’s as much of a physical meditation outlet for me as weightlifting or yoga.”
When Fugitt moved from wrestling to Jiu Jitsu, he worked with a trainer, Brent Alvarez, who eventually moved to Art of War Mixed Martial Arts and Fitness, a gym in downtown Eugene.
Jiu Jitsu and wrestling are types of “ground fighting.” While in wrestling, you beat your opponent by taking them down to the ground, Jiu Jitsu focuses on fighting defensively, picking yourself off the mat to win the fight.
Fugitt followed his Jiu Jitsu trainer to Art of War for a new kind of fighting class: Muay Thai.
Muay Thai, like boxing, is considered “stand-up fighting.” Fugitt says it’s known as “the art of eight limbs,” with fighters using kicks, jabs, elbows and holds to submit their opponent and knock them down.
Fugitt says he went into the class with a bit of arrogance – he calls it "the egotistical wrestler in me.” With his background in wrestling and Jiu Jitsu, he expected to pick up Muay Thai easily.
But things rarely work out that way.
“I walked in and got my butt handed to me,” Fugitt remembers. “At that moment, I decided to dedicate all my time and energy to stand-up. It was like, ‘I can wrestle with people. I know how to defend myself. I know how to take people down and hold them down. But I don’t know anything about throwing punches or kicks.’”Fugitt says a big motivator for his fighting progression has been the many opportunities to learn. He says, as a fighter, you have to be a student.
“The moment you stop learning,” he says, “is the moment you’re gonna lose.”
So, Fugitt learned to combine stand-up and ground fighting for three years while training at Art of War.
That’s where he met Jason Georgianna, the owner and head coach at Art of War.
Georgianna remembers almost immediately realizing that Fugitt was different from other fighters in the gym.
“It's not easy to come in, excel at Jiu Jitsu, then be like, I want to do Muay Thai and have the ability to stand there and just trade blows with somebody, right?” Georgianna says. “He did.”
After three years at the gym, Georgianna scheduled Fugitt’s first amateur MMA fight.
Fugitt remembers how, when he entered the amateur scene, he was immediately underestimated. He wasn’t big and muscular, he didn’t have many fights under his belt and, least intimidating of all, he smiled. A lot.
He says opponents would see his photo for a potential face-off and sometimes respond within the hour, “like, ‘Oh, yeah, we’ll fight this guy.’” People told him to smile less or made comments assuming he was unprepared. But Fugitt says he never changed his attitude.
“I just have this different energy about myself. I’m not angry. It’s very much a sport for me. This is what I love to do. I’m getting to live out my dream,” he says.
Fugitt went on to win his first three amateur fights, and then—with Georgianna’s encouragement—decided to start fighting professionally.
Nine days for a dream to come true
In amateur fights, Fugitt says the point was to learn, improve and even make mistakes. The stakes were lower, and so was the pressure.
But professional fighting was more regimented, more demanding. The margin for error was significantly smaller, Fugitt says, and there was more on the line. But with higher expectations came a reward: financial compensation.
Starting out, it wasn’t much. But Fugitt could finally get a glimpse of what a career as a professional fighter would look like.
Twice, it looked like a loss. Five times, it looked like a win by submission or knockout. Twice, it looked like a title win, with the referee lifting Fugitt’s hand up at the end of the fight, strapping a belt around his waist.
Then, the COVID-19 pandemic halted his steady collection of wins. Fights were cancelled, gyms shut down and Fugitt’s phone went dry.
He remembers thinking: “This sucks. I may never fight again. I may not accomplish my goal because of this.”
But in 2022, more than two years after his last fight, Fugitt got a call from a professional MMA promotion company offering a fight in New York.
Eager to get back in the ring, Fugitt accepted, flew to Niagara Falls and knocked out Solomon Renfro in 43 seconds.
Five months later, he received the call of a lifetime.
“We just had a fallout. We need to plug somebody in there. Are you ready to go?” his manager said, relaying what UFC organizers had told him.
The fight was in nine days.
Nine days, Fugitt says in retrospect, is an absurd amount of time to prepare for a fight. But this was the biggest fight of his career. And Fugitt had never been more ready.
In Dallas, Fugitt went through the motions of his first UFC fight, trying to soak it all in. He did his first interviews and press conferences, rode the bus with fighters he had watched for years and finally, walked out to the octagon for the first time.
Then his opponent, Michael Morales, walked out. It was also Morales’ debut fight in the UFC.
Morales and Fugitt fought until the last round, when Morales knocked Fugitt down. The referee pulled Morales off of Fugitt, waved the fight off, and it was over.
The loss was difficult to take.
Fighting with kindness
Fugitt acknowledges that he is hard on himself. Too hard sometimes, Georgianna says. Fugitt’s parents say it’s been difficult to watch. He takes losses personally, going over his mistakes in his head. The frustration of losing after so much preparation and training can take over.
“I can find myself in these moments where I just want to scream; I just want to punch something which is, you know, totally immature,” Fugitt says. “These emotional moments will come on, where it's scream, or punch something or break down and cry. Yes, we do cry. It's a lot.”
Georgianna says a big part of his job training Fugitt was pulling him out of pits of self-doubt and self-criticism.
“He would tend to get in a dark place,” Georgianna says. Most times, he would tell Fugitt, “Hey, let’s talk about the good things you did.”
Georgianna says he’s seen an improvement in Fugitt’s ability to take a loss, especially since he moved to Arizona last year. He’s also begun working with a sports psychologist.
Since his first against Morales, who is now undefeated and in the running for a world title, Fugitt has fought four UFC fights. He’s won two, and lost two, including his most recent fight in July.
While the losses still sting, Fugitt has adopted a more optimistic mindset.
“At the end of the day, you could do everything right and still eat the wrong punch,” he says. “It's the nature of the beast.”
Instead of letting a loss keep him down, Fugitt says he looks back on the fight “with kindness.”
The key, he says, is acknowledging the work put in and the outcome in a productive way, taking in the small wins within a loss, and going back to the drawing board ready to improve on the errors.
For Fugitt, giving up is never an option. He understands that people wonder why he goes back into the ring after a loss and the ensuing recovery and training.
But Fugitt says he has more to prove.
“I still have three fights on my contract with the UFC, and I want to get all three of those fights…I've worked my butt off for far too long to just tuck tail and give up,” he says. “I didn't get into the game to be a 50/50 fighter. That's not how I want to be remembered.”
Going into his next three fights, Fugitt says he’ll continue to bring the work ethic and smiles that have gotten him this far.
Through the good times and the bad, his parents say they’ll continue to support his dreams.
“We don’t want him knowing that we worry about him as much as we worry about him, because we do,” Nathan says.
“We’re just extremely proud of our boy,” Melissa adds. “Proud, supportive, and love him.”
Georgianna says he misses Fugitt now that he’s in Arizona, but he doesn’t stay out of Eugene for too long. Fugitt visited this summer, to see family and teach a few classes at Art of War.
“We're his home. He’s always gonna come back here,” he says. “It's nice to have him in town for a little bit.”
And whatever happens in his future, Fugitt says he can always be proud of what he’s already accomplished, and look back on his time at Art of War fondly.
“I've made it from my home gym in Eugene, Oregon. I can tip my hat to myself,” he says. “I’m proud of what we were able to accomplish here. It was a whole team effort. Family and team is definitely here.”
