FAIR LAWN, N.J.  He had wrestled as an all-American, led high school and college football teams to winning seasons, and once rushed for six touchdowns in a game. He was once in Sports Illustrated, a teenage “Face in the Crowd.”

But that was all more than a decade ago, before the coaches in the N.F.L. and the Canadian Football League saw him and did not take a second look. That was before the Colgate University diploma and the years of corporate consulting, and before his company transferred him to its Chicago office and then transferred him back to its New York office, and before the bald spot and the new job selling orthodontics.

Now, the day before his 34th birthday, Jamal Patterson was driving his sport utility vehicle through these vinyl-sided precincts of diminished dreams. He parked outside a cavernous gym, traded his slacks and his Oxford shirt for camouflage shorts and a sweatshirt depicting a clenched fist, and he took his place among the fighters.

There were two weeks left to train and 14 of his 219 pounds left to cut before the mixed martial arts match of his life, billed as New Blood, New Battles, on Friday at the Izod Center in East Rutherford. Patterson is scheduled to fight Vladimir Matyushenko, the light heavyweight champion of the International Fight League who is known as the Janitor. In preparation, Patterson was squeezing in workouts between his sales calls.