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Brett Okamoto, ESPN Staff Writer
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — A private helicopter descends on Trump International Golf Course, and Colby Covington calmly emerges in a lilac polo, khaki shorts and white sunglasses. He has been reserved all morning in the helicopter, nodding politely through small talk on a 20-minute flight from Miami, but as he walks off the helipad and toward the clubhouse, a transformation begins. He breaks into a wide, animated grin and sticks his tongue out at the camera, almost instinctively.
This transformation is for the sake of a camera crew that is here to discuss his upcoming fight. Every detail about the shoot — from the scenery, to the aircraft, to a brief appearance by former President Donald J. Trump himself — has been arranged by Covington. None of it is fake, in that it hasn’t been scripted or rehearsed, but it is nevertheless what Covington wants you to see. It’s a show, in which he is playing a much louder, more arrogant version of himself.
“Most fighters can’t even find an Uber here, and I’m showing up in a helicopter,” Covington tells the cameras. “I think that shows who runs business around here.”
Trump, a friend of UFC CEO Dana White, has received support from Covington during and after his presidency. Trump has attended a number of Covington’s fights and said he will again be at the card on Saturday.
Covington (17-3) will challenge Leon Edwards (21-3) for the welterweight championship at UFC 296 in Las Vegas (10 p.m. on ESPN+ pay-per-view). It will be his third shot at the title. Covington won an interim belt in 2018, but came up short in both of his previous attempts against Kamaru Usman to win the undisputed version. Saturday’s result will have a long-lasting impact on his legacy and bank account. Turning 36 next month, this could be his last chance.
If he’s successful, it will be interesting to see how the world reacts. Over the past seven years, Covington has turned himself into one of the most polarizing figures in MMA, often crossing the lines of moral and ethical responsibility in doing so. He has been kicked out of a gym in South Florida and labeled by some as a racist because of his targeted choice of words towards fighters and countries. He has threatened the life of a UFC broadcaster and developed such a personal rivalry with former friend and teammate Jorge Masvidal that after fighting each other inside the Octagon, Masvidal publicly assaulted him outside a restaurant in Miami and pled no contest to a misdemeanor battery charge.
Through it all, Covington has remained completely unapologetic. And with a win on Saturday, a rising legion of fans who appreciate his antics will provide arguably the loudest ovation for a UFC champion in 2023.
“Everybody hates me,” he says. “But people can say whatever they want. They’re talking about one of the best fighters of all time, and they aren’t even the best burger flipper in their household. They’re jealous and they’re envious.”
After about 40 minutes of fight talk on the outdoor patio, the cameras switch off and the crew breaks. Covington quietly sinks back into his chair, and the re-transformation takes place. It’s not as if everything about him changes, but his entire energy and tone dramatically shift. He slides into the background — as effortlessly as he commanded the spotlight moments ago.
Standing to the side, taking it all in, is Covington’s father, Brad, who is visiting from Oregon. He watches it unfold with amusement. He’s been at his son’s side through this athletic journey, from the day Covington fell in love with wrestling after watching his first UFC event in the ’90s, through his collegiate career and fighting debut. He was there in 2017 in Brazil, when his son referred to Brazilians as “filthy animals” on the mic and they required security to exit the country.
Brad didn’t fully approve of Covington’s “persona” at first, but now he understands it. He doesn’t believe it’s why Covington is successful, more that it’s a necessary evil in a sport where wins aren’t always enough to earn the best opportunities. When asked to put his perspective into words, he utters something that would seem to contradict the narrative Covington has used to aid (even save) his career.
“I see a kid who feels like he’s doing what he needs to do to get to the level he’s at,” Brad says. “This is an ugly sport. They walk him to a cage in his underwear to take another man’s brain cells. So, he’s expected to do that, but then he says a few mean words and people say, ‘Oh, how can Colby say that?’ No words can be any worse than what he’s going into that cage to do.
“I always thought, ‘OK, you’ll be the heel and that at some point you’ll have a turn and be the good guy.’ I’ve kind of been waiting on that. Whether it happens or not, I don’t know. But if you actually look at what Colby has done, what he supports and what his values are, that turn has happened. If you look deep into Colby, Colby is a good guy.”
THROUGHOUT COVINGTON’S LIFE, every decision he made has been heavily influenced by two key motivators: becoming the best wrestler (and fighter) in the world and getting paid.
Wrestling was his only concern in grade school. He initially loved karate, but his interest turned to grappling when he saw how effective it was in the early days of the UFC. Wrestling was also an outlet. Covington moved to Oregon from California when he was in elementary school and didn’t immediately have a lot of friends.
“I got picked on a lot; I got bullied,” Covington says. “Kids made fun of my buckteeth. ‘You’ve got a field goal post in the middle of your teeth!’ I would get angry, and I would channel that into the wrestling room. I’d be like, ‘Yeah, you want to talk now?’ I would just drill a double-leg takedown over and over, hundreds, thousands of times. I would do things most kids didn’t want to do. They didn’t want to get bloody.”
Covington’s lack of interest in anything else actually became a detriment to his athletics. He was heavily recruited by NCAA Division I programs after high school, but was ineligible to attend because his grades were too poor. He ultimately went to Iowa Central Community College, where he won a national junior college championship as a freshman.
“Not a lot of good wrestlers come from Oregon,” Covington says. “The breeding grounds for wrestling are the Midwest and Northeast, so no one knew who I was. I went out there and won a national title, went undefeated that season. People were like, ‘Who is this kid? He came out of nowhere.'”
Following his freshman year, Covington was once again recruited by top Division I schools. He committed to the University of Iowa, one of the most prestigious programs in the history of collegiate wrestling, but made one of the biggest mistakes of his life before his sophomore year. In 2008, he was arrested on a DUI charge and was forced to redshirt that wrestling season. He remained at Iowa the following year but was essentially relegated to a non-starter.
“I think it was the first week he was there, some boosters took him to a bar and he made the mistake of driving home intoxicated,” Brad says. “His face was splattered all across the major newspapers. He went through the legal hoops and still wanted to focus on wrestling, but [coach] Tom Brands wouldn’t give him the opportunity to compete for a starting spot because, ‘You got a DUI and embarrassed me.'”
Looking back, there is some irony in the fact that Covington believes part of the reason the incident happened is that he wasn’t used to the attention he initially received in Iowa. His reputation in MMA today almost revolves around his ability to thrive in the spotlight, but back then, he had no idea how to handle it.
“I had never gotten into trouble in my life,” Covington says. “There I was, a kid going to Iowa, this star wrestler for the best team in the country and I was like, ‘Whoa, I’ve never had this celebrity status before.’
“It was tough because my whole life, all I wanted to do was wrestle for Iowa under Dan Gable and Tom Brands. And then I get there, and I’m a failure to those guys. They lost hope in me. They gave up on me essentially. I thought that was a little harsh, for someone to lose hope after one night. I thought it was a little cruel.”
Brands, Iowa’s current head coach and winner of four national championships, declined to comment for this story.
Covington transferred out of Iowa the following year and returned home to Oregon State University. He went on to become a two-time Pac-10 conference champion and an All-American. He believes things happen for a reason, and that his collegiate experience went the way it needed to. The incident at Iowa lit a different kind of fire for Covington.
His father agrees, with one caveat. Brad was an amateur wrestler as well, and one of the appeals of the sport that he passed on to his son is that it’s a world in which everything is earned on the mat. No politics, no favoritism. The results speak for themselves. So, watching his son go a full year at Iowa in which Brad felt Colby wasn’t even given a chance to prove himself on the mats left a sour taste.
“The greatest thing about wrestling is that you determine your own destiny,” Brad says. “Here he was at the University of Iowa, and someone else is making the decision that he can’t compete because he made a mistake. I’ll never agree with that. I’ll never agree with what Tom Brands did to my son. Everybody makes mistakes, and he overcame that mistake better than most people would have. He stayed focused on becoming the greatest fighter on the planet.”
2:07
Kamaru Usman weighs in on main event between Edwards and Covington
Kamaru Usman joins “DC & RC” to discuss the Welterweight Championship between Leon Edwards and Colby Covington.
ON NOV. 8, 2014, three years before Covington’s “filthy animals” comments in Brazil, he appeared in his second UFC fight against Wagner Silva. The bout took place in Uberlåndia, Brazil.
A fresh-faced Covington dominated Silva that night, submitting him in the third round. Immediately after the tap, Covington calmly stood up, turned around and bowed to Silva, who was still knelt on the canvas. It’s an image of Covington that’s not often replayed.
“He was a gracious fighter when he came into the UFC,” Brad says. “But he wasn’t getting the attention he thought he deserved.”
Covington went 7-1 in the UFC from 2014 to 2017, with several of those contests taking place in his opponent’s home country. He competed in China, Brazil, Singapore and Canada.
It was Oct. 28, 2017, when Covington faced two-time Brazilian title challenger Demian Maia in Sao Paulo, where he first showed the transformation. After defeating Maia via unanimous decision, he launched into a verbal attack on Brazil.
“Brazil, you’re a dump!” Covington said to ESPN’s Daniel Cormier in his postfight interview. “All you filthy animals suck. I got one thing to say. Tyron Woodley, I’m coming for you. If you don’t answer the front door, I’m going to knock it in and I’m going to take what’s mine, the welterweight belt!”
Years later, Covington would claim the UFC had informed him it was going to cut him from the roster, win or lose that night, because he wasn’t exciting enough. He was performing at a level that warranted title consideration, but was about to be out of a job. The UFC has never confirmed that story, but never denied it, either.
“He dominated Demian Maia. No one does that to Demian Maia,” Brad says. “And they were going to cut him. So, he said what he said, we were literally escorted out of the country, and his popularity soared. And he never got cut.”
Once the persona was born, Covington never looked back. Just one month later, he was in Australia for appearances and refused to back down from a confrontation with Brazilian heavyweight Fabricio Werdum, to the point where Werdum threw a boomerang at his head. He continued to embrace being the antagonist by poking at fans when he leaked the endings of “Star Wars” and “Avengers” films on social media and told people to “go get laid” instead of seeing it. Now, because of his actions, he was in the headlines — far more than he’d ever been.
Perhaps not coincidentally, he was also getting the best MMA opportunities of his life. Opportunities that offered what he really wanted — to prove he was the best fighter in the world and to make money. Five of his six appearances since “going heel” have served as main events. Three have come with an official or interim title on the line. He’d been winning fights for five years as a professional, and it had resulted in flying to other countries and occasionally facing their hometown heroes. One postfight speech changed that.
What he hasn’t done to date is see it all the way through. He has had an elite career, which includes taking an interim UFC title into the sitting president’s Oval Office in 2018, but he has never been crowned the undisputed welterweight champion of the world or profited from the pay-per-view sales that are usually only awarded to the undisputed champion of the world.
He has been tantalizingly close. In 2018, the UFC stripped Covington of his interim title just two months after he’d won it, when he was forced to turn down a fight against sitting champion Tyron Woodley because of nasal surgery. Covington would later dominate Woodley in a five-round win in 2020, but with no belt on the line. His two title fights came against Usman, and both were controversial in Covington’s eyes. He believes the first one, a fifth-round TKO loss, was stopped too soon, and that judges got it wrong in their rematch, which he lost by unanimous decision.
There has been some uproar about Covington even fighting for a title on Saturday, as his record is only 2-2 in his past four appearances and he hasn’t fought in nearly two years. According to Covington, the UFC offered him several fights over that time, and he agreed to all of them. He says it would be ludicrous for anyone to think he’d choose to sit out for this long during the prime of his career, and that any narrative that suggests he’s undeserving of any opportunity is simply emotionally biased — the result of his ability to rile people up.
“[People who actually know me] would probably say I’m the underdog kid,” Covington says. “I’m not supposed to be here. I’m not the most talented. I’m definitely the hardest worker in the room, but I never had the most talent. I was just willing to do whatever it took.”
THERE HAVE BEEN many successful villains in the history of the UFC, so it’s hard to lock down an all-time best. That said, one very popular candidate for the title of greatest heel ever would be Chael Sonnen.
The similarities between Sonnen, a retired UFC middleweight, and Covington are rather stark. Both of them grew up wrestling in the state of Oregon. Both reached a point in their careers where they realized simply winning wasn’t enough. Coincidentally, both used Brazil as a lightning rod to jump-start their personas. Covington, at the Maia fight. Sonnen, with his long-lasting, and occasionally racially charged, rivalry against Anderson Silva.
“Everyone would like to be loved, but at some point, you observe that every story has a bad guy,” says Sonnen, who is nicknamed “The Bad Guy.” “No one wants to be that guy. Every ‘bad guy’ this sport has seen gets put there, and it hurts their feelings. And some will say, ‘Oh, how can I fix my image?’ while others will say, ‘Screw all of that. Let me give you what you really want, which is the other side of the story, the bad guy side.’ It’s entertainment, it’s a performance, and when it’s done well, it sells out arenas.”
An unexpected thing happened, however, at the later stage of Sonnen’s career. In 2014, a couple of years after he fought Anderson Silva for the second time, Sonnen flew to Sao Paulo to film “The Ultimate Fighter” reality series opposite Wanderlei Silva, another iconic figure in Brazilian MMA. The filming lasted 34 days, and for the entirety of his stay, Sonnen required a security detail that consisted of six men and an armored vehicle.
“I remember looking at my wife and joking, ‘If we need all of this, then why are we here?'” Sonnen says. “This can’t be worth it.”
After 34 days without major incident, Sonnen left Brazil. He returned a couple of months later to attend “The Ultimate Fighter” finale in Sao Paulo, and after the show had aired, received standing cheers from the Brazilian crowd.
It reminded Sonnen of a conversation he and Canadian professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper had at the beginning of his “heel turn” in 2010.
“He told me, ‘Keep doing what you’re doing, and someday the crowd will love you for the very things they hate you for now,'” Sonnen recalls. “That’s almost poetry, isn’t it? And I only understood what he meant about five years later when it happened to me. And I would say the same to Colby. Don’t change. I want to see him keep doing what he’s been doing, and eventually he will be loved for exactly what they don’t love him for.”
Covington’s father, Brad, wouldn’t mind if Sonnen ended up being right. He says he has lost friendships over the years because of his son. When Covington, a kid from Thurston, Oregon, visited the sitting president in 2018, his father found that to be a very big deal — and says he would have found it to be a big deal regardless of that particular president’s politics.
If Covington does win a UFC championship on Saturday and is finally crowned the best welterweight on the planet, will we still see the persona he’s honed so well? “He’ll be walking on air when he wins that belt; that’s something he has fought a long time for,” Brad says. “And when the mic comes, he’ll probably be promoting his next opponent. He’ll want to maximize his earning potential. He’s watched everyone else do that. He’s going to go after the biggest names and do whatever is best for business, and that’s exactly what he should do.”