UFC 309 marks the Madison Square Garden debut for the biggest blue chipper in the sport, Bo Nickal.
Well, sort of.
OK, not really.
The 27-year-old wrestling wunderkind out of Penn State has never fought at the Garden. He’ll break the seal on that distinction Saturday night against Scotland’s Paul Craig.
But Nickal is all too familiar with the World’s Most Famous Arena, where plenty of tears were shed upon falling short the only time he wasn’t the top collegiate wrestler in his weight class.
As a 19-year-old freshman in 2016, the top-ranked 174-pounder in Division I settled for runner-up status against Ohio State’s Myles Martin.
“It’s funny, I was at the Rangers game [Tuesday] night, and it was like, a lot of emotion coming back because I was walking backstage and I saw, just like, some of the spots that I was, like, crying in and stuff like that,” Nickal recalled with The Post during this week’s UFC 309 media day.said. “And I was like, ‘Wow, that’s so crazy. It was right there almost 10 years ago,’ and now we’re back.”
Nickal (6-0, six finishes) generally doesn’t do losing. He fell just once more as a sophomore on his way to three NCAA individual titles and an overall 120-3 NCAA record.
Though his Olympic dreams came up short three years ago at the U.S. team trials, he’s unbeaten since making the transition to MMA.
Elite wrestlers can go far in this sport, and Nickal is one of the most pedigreed to make the jump. It’s at the center of why there’s so much excitement in the fight game for how far he can go.
The UFC quickly caught wind and might have signed Nickal right after winning his pro debut in 33 seconds in June 2022, but it opted to have him compete twice on the prospect-mining Dana White’s Contender Series first.
Chalk that up more to using Nickal’s already simmering name value to draw eyeballs to the UFC pipeline program.
As prospects go, Nickal is a promotional unicorn.
He has competed exclusively on pay-per-view programming, debuting at UFC 285 last year on the pay-per-view portion of Jon Jones’ heavyweight debut.
(Jones finally puts the championship he won that night on the line for the first time in Saturday’s main event against Stipe Miocic.)
Although he says he would fight at the intimate UFC Apex, he’s smart enough to see what’s going on with the management of his budding career.
“I think that it just goes to show the type of draw I am, how many people want to watch me, and the support that I have from the wrestling community and that growing community of fans,” Nickal said of his marquee placement on tentpole events. “I don’t think that they’re putting me on pay-per-view cards, UFC 300, MSG, these massive shows for no reason, right? It’s a little bit to build me, but it’s also because a lot of people want to watch me.”
Most in their third year of fighting are still on the regional scene, in many cases taking five or more bouts a year to build experience — and earn some money, which is not plentiful on the regional scene.
Nickal’s unique mix of decades-honed wrestling prowess and name value have him earning a more comfortable living than just about anyone with merely a half-dozen pro bouts on his ledger, but it’s come at the cost of in-cage experience.
The UFC has kept him at a pace of two fights per year.
Nickal recognizes the double-edged sword he’s working with.
“It hurts because I just don’t have the cage time that other people have. I’ve had less than 10 minutes in the cage in total in my pro career, and most people get that in one fight,” Nickal explains. “As far as experience goes, that’s a negative. But you look at the positives. I’m healthy; I, obviously, have a 100 percent finish rate, and a lot of people want to see me fight. For me, again, the main focus is just developing, improving, getting better. The result of the fight is kind of secondary, right?”
Craig (17-8-1, 17 finishes) represents the next big stepping stone in a career some project could take off by leaps and bounds.
A win over the submission ace, who has previously appeared in the UFC’s divisional rankings but has lost four of his last five, may set him up for a ranked opponent next year. And already some envision a not-too-distant future in which he fights for the UFC middleweight championship.
But Nickal is comfortable with the cadence of his rise. He’s good with the process of adding skills and improving while gaining cage time.
UFC gold, he expects, will come, but in due time.
“I think I got a lot of work to do, in my opinion,” Nickal says. “I’m always gonna have a lot of work to do. Even when I’m the champ, there’s still a lot of development to be done, so … there’s no limits on the timeline of the way that it needs to go, in my mind. I’m just focused on development, improving, getting better. If it happens in a year, great. It happens in three years, great. I just know where I’m headed. I know my trajectory, and that’s really what I’m concerned with.”
