Chico Camus is back home now. He’s back at Milwaukee’s Roufusport gym, back in that sweaty basement room on 76th Street, back with the people who helped him change, and maybe even save his life.

There were a lot of other ways it could have gone for the 30-year-old Camus (14-5 MMA, 3-2 UFC), who grew up in the rough neighborhoods on Milwaukee’s south side. As he put the finishing touches on his training camp for what could very well be the biggest fight of his life – a flyweight showdown with Olympic gold medalist wrestler Henry Cejudo (8-0 MMA, 2-0 UFC) at UFC 188 this Saturday – he couldn’t help but reflect on what might have become of him if former UFC lightweight champ Anthony Pettis hadn’t helped steer him toward MMA.

When he met Pettis, Camus said, he was involved in “gangs and violence and selling drugs and doing drugs and all that crazy stuff that comes with it,” he told MMAjunkie.

He watched as friends – 17 of them, to be exact, he said – were indicted, many of them convicted and sent off on long prison stretches. Then Pettis introduced him to mixed martial arts, and Camus fell in love. Three years after his pro debut, he was fighting in the UFC, yet still reeling from how close he came to being “wiped out.”

“I get calls from prison, from these same guys that I could have been jail bunkies with,” Camus said. “They’re calling me telling me they’ve just seen me fight on TV. That’s … I can’t even describe that feeling.”

Camus got his start as a training partner for Pettis. The first 10 months of his budding career were spent, as he remembers it, “getting my face high kicked off.” Pettis, along with his younger brother Sergio, soon became good friends with Camus. They brought him to Duke Roufus, who saw potential that wasn’t being fulfilled.

But the thing about Roufus, as he’ll be the first to admit, is that he doesn’t always deal well with people who aren’t doing all he thinks they can do. He and Camus butted heads on multiple occasions, as he told MMAjunkie last year. It got so bad that, almost as soon as Camus had fought his way into the UFC, he found himself exiled, without a gym to call home.

Looking back, the dispute was “childish,” Camus said. When Roufus told the Pettis brothers that he’d be open to discussing Camus’ return, Camus reached out to try and make things right. Roufus welcomed him home soon after that, and since his return, Roufus said, things have been “better than ever.”

“My only problem with Chico, he’s a great guy,” Roufus said. “Just a great guy. I love him. We’ve never had a problem, relationship-wise. My thing is getting him to realize his potential. That’s what I want to see him do. That’s my job. Because I remember when Chico started from nothing and Anthony brought him in from the streets.”

For Camus, the return seemed like a necessity. He won a decision over Yaotzin Meza in 2014 that was later changed to a no-contest after Camus tested positive for marijuana, but after that fight he admitted that he’d had to cobble together a training camp, doing less sparring than he’d ever done before a fight.

He lost a decision to Chris Holdsworth in his next fight, then reunited with Roufus just in time to make his debut as a flyweight in a successful split-decision effort over Brad Pickett last November.

“I feel like I needed to come back,” Camus said. “This is where everything started. When I was gone I felt like a depressed little kid, seeing pictures online of guys that, you know, I started with Anthony. I started with Sergio. Even before I came to Duke’s, I started with these guys. These guys are like my brothers, so it was only right to come back to where I was supposed to be.”

The move was a timely one, as Cejudo likely represents the toughest challenge – as well as the biggest opportunity – that Camus has seen since signing with the UFC. It’s the kind of fight that oddsmakers don’t expect him to win (at the time of this writing, Cejudo is roughly a 10-1 favorite), which also makes it the kind of fight that could rocket him up the ranks if he manages to pull off the upset.

And that, Camus said, is exactly why he “jumped for joy” when the UFC offered him the fight. Back at Roufusport, he had guys like former Olympian Ben Askren to help him improve his wrestling. He also had Sergio Pettis as his main sparring partner. It was everything he needed, he said, to get ready for a guy like Cejudo.

From Roufus’ perspective, the fight comes at the right time for Camus, who he said has finally matured into a fighter capable of reaching his full potential.

“Sometimes, when you come from nothing, you don’t necessarily value yourself enough,” Roufus said. “I think he didn’t value and have confidence enough in himself. He thought, ‘Oh, I’m just doing this to get an easy paycheck.’ Now he’s thinking career-minded, title-minded, and he never said those words before to me.”

According to Camus, at least some of that has to do with those calls from prison. If he can come that close to throwing his life away and still salvage a run at his dreams, he said, he hopes to be the success story that will inspire others.

“I feel like this is what I was meant for,” Camus said. “I’ve been a gladiator my whole life. Whether I was in the UFC or whether I was even in MMA, I was fighting my whole life. It seems like I was fighting for this reason.”

For more on UFC 188, stay tuned to the UFC Rumors section of the site.