Aluminum siding salesmen, take note. This is how you close a deal.
It takes guts to be an MMA fighter. Knocking on the door of the sport’s most high-profile gym, essentially as a stranger, with nothing in your pockets but $200 and your two bare hands, well, that’s a deeper shade of chutzpah.
But that’s what Phil Hawes did. He walked right past the no-solicitors sign at the Jackson-Winkeljohn gym in New Mexico and cold-called on a sparring session there, with not much more than a gut-deep belief in himself to back him up. He had driven more than 1,000 miles away from home to be there, and a few bucks and a friend’s hospitality formed the sum total of his plan B.
Lucky for him, then, that plan A did the trick.
“I had a college buddy down here,” Hawes recalled. “I knew what Greg Jackson had to offer. The first day I got there, it was a sparring day. You see a guy come in; you want to know who this guy thinks he is. … I can’t remember who all I sparred, but I held my own.”
Hawes, now 27 years old and 3-0 as a pro, has established himself as the top middleweight prospect in the sport. Following a deflating loss in the first round of the current season of The Ultimate Fighter, Hawes has a new contract and a desire to wash that performance away, with extreme prejudice.
“I want to stay active, on the ball,” Hawes said in an exclusive interview with Bleacher Report. “You’re gonna see a lot of me, probably more than you want to. I can’t wait.”
The word on Hawes spread quickly thanks to a comic-book build and social-media hype from new teammates like Jon Jones. His national junior-college wrestling title at Iowa Central Community College—the incognito MMA factory that molded Jon Jones and Cain Velasquez—didn’t hurt, either. His current status is two years in the making, but it didn’t even take a full day to convince Jackson-Wink fighters and coaches of his major league potential.
“I was out of town when he showed up, but I got a call from the gym manager saying, ‘Hey, this JUCO wrestler just showed up, and he made an impression,’” recalled Jackson-Wink striking coach Brandon Gibson. “I don’t get a lot of calls like that.
He got the coaches’ attention and a lot of high-level fighters.”
What, other than the chutzpah it takes to drive all that way to knock on a door that formidable, sets Hawes apart? Plenty of people, including Hawes himself, point to the “explosive” way he fights and the cartoonish strength and athleticism that come from the gym-rat lifestyle he proudly espouses. But to hear Gibson tell it, there’s a lot more to the story.
“The biggest part is his intelligence. He has a really high fight IQ,” Gibson said. “It’s easy to get caught up in his athleticism or his physique. But like Jon Jones, he picks things up really quickly.”
There’s also the matter of work ethic. Hawes is a man of few words, so when he goes out of his way to tell someone “I don’t want to be anywhere else but the gym,” it rings true.
“I think I work harder than anyone in the game, and it shows,” Hawes said. “I don’t really do camps. I’m always training. The only change during camp is running at 5:30 a.m. I do three or four practices in a day.”
It paid off in his first three fights, when Hawes racked up two knockouts and one submission without ever seeing a third round. He’s still young and growing as an MMA fighter, but his remarkable combination of strength and aggression probably gives him a leg up on any other 3-0 middleweight out there. His takedowns are hard to stop, his top control is oppressive and his ground strikes add up quickly.
Signing with Titan FC made some waves in MMA circles, but a fight never materialized, as Hawes’ reputation began to precede him and potential opponents switched off their phones. As one month gave way to the next, Hawes tried to use his busy gym schedule to keep stagnation at bay.
It didn’t seem to work.
Last year, Hawes left Jackson-Wink for the Blackzilians team in Florida, only to return before the year was out. Then there were the tryouts for the 23rd season of TUF—Hawes was considered a favorite to win the moment his name was linked to the show—then came a sluggish loss to Andrew Sanchez in the season-opening preliminary round. By the time Hawes faced Sanchez, it had been a year-and-a-half since he last competed.
“Training is one thing, but there’s nothing like getting in the cage. You can’t simulate that,” Hawes said. “The ring rust is all it was. It really dampened my performance. I couldn’t piece it all together.”
Without going into specifics, Hawes said “a lot of external things” contributed to the defeat. It doesn’t take a mind-reader to sense Hawes’ eagerness to hoist himself out of that bitter TUF stew.
That was a big influence in his recent signing with World Series of Fighting. Hawes and Gibson both expressed a need to stay busy, presumably driven by the lessons of TUF and Titan. Hawes said specifically, “It’s in my [WSOF] contract that I have at least one fight every three months.”
“We’d all like Phil fighting every couple of months. There’s only so much you can do in the gym,” Gibson said. “We wanted to get him with a promotion that was going to keep him busy.”
On top of that, Hawes seems ready for a new sales pitch—this time, to the MMA fighting public. At his training home, plenty of converts have his back.
“I’ve been at Jackson-Winkeljohn for about 13 years, and I’ve seen multiple champions. That’s a hard room to shine in sometimes,” Gibson said. “Phil Hawes is one of those guys from day one to shine.”
The Beaten Path is Bleacher Report's ongoing series highlighting MMA's top prospects. For the previous interview in the series, click here. All quotes obtained firsthand. Scott Harris covers MMA for Bleacher Report. For more, follow Scott on Twitter.
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