Chance Q. Cook

cqcook@gannett.com

Seventeen days out from his eighth Ultimate Fighting Championship fight — 18th professional fight overall, second fight for the UFC since returning in 2015 — Ithaca native and Binghamton resident Tamdan McCrory is a busy man.

On Mondays, Wednesdays and Saturdays, McCrory makes the commute from his home in Binghamton to the Syracuse area to train with his longtime coach, Kevin Seaman. When he’s not training for his own fights, he’s training others at Broome County Martial Arts, where he’s led the academy since its opening in 2013. Meanwhile, the 29-year-old mixed martial arts fighter is raising a family with his wife, Haley, a local TV news anchor.

A few weeks out from his middleweight fight against Krzysztof Jotko, a Polish fighter with a 17-1 professional record, McCrory’s 12-week training regimen finally hits a taper. A session of 10 rounds of mitts a day is now down to five to eight rounds. A strength circuit may have gone seven rounds at the height of his training. That’s now down to three or four sets. “It’s not the quantity of the work, it’s the quality,” McCrory said over the phone while driving alone on a Wednesday training day.

“The only thing that can happen now is getting burned out,” he adds. “Now, I need to make sure I’m feeding my body, doing the right workouts, lowering volume and staying healthy between now and fight day.”

Fight day is Saturday. UFC Fight Night 89, headlined by a welterweight bout between Rory MacDonald and Stephen Thompson, takes place at the TD Place Arena in Ottawa.

A look back at McCrory’s last three professional fights shows an imposing fighter who looks to be on his way up in a stacked UFC middleweight division. Three wins, three finishes. The most recent of which was a third-round triangle choke of Josh Samman at a UFC on Fox event in December 2015, his first fight for UFC since a split-decision loss to John Howard at UFC 101 in 2009.

In the six-and-a-half years that separate those fights, there’s been much turmoil for the fighter known to fans as “The Barn Cat” — starting a family, bad business, a car accident, a need to provide for that new family and an everlasting itch to get back into the fight game that he never wanted to leave, an unlikely return and an even less likely 87 seconds of action in two fights in 2014 that sent him flying back to UFC.

Binghamton's Tamdan McCrory reignites MMA career with KO

Binghamton's Tamdan McCrory set for UFC Fight Night

Before he fought

For most professional fighters, there’s a strong background in combat sports, at least one discipline. Whether it's boxing, jiu jitsu, judo, grappling — there’s a strength that the fighter can rely on.

Not quite for McCrory; not at the start, anyway.

While he was a wrestler at Ithaca High School, he admittedly was never great.

“I worked ridiculously hard at (wrestling), but for not the best return,” he said.

While a state title and college recruitment wasn’t going to happen, he did improve. A 1-7 record as a freshman turned into an 8-18 season as a sophomore. His first winning season, a 9-5 junior campaign, was cut short by a fractured pelvis. As a senior, McCrory began to pile up wins, 25 against just seven losses. But just as he seemed to find his place in the sport, high school was over and wrestling wasn’t going with him.

“I went to (SUNY) Cortland because I didn’t know what I wanted to do,” he said. He thought he’d want to study athletic training, and having had a girlfriend in the area at the time of high school graduation, he had no plans of wandering too far.

And while he never was a great high school wrestler in an area that has grown accustomed to producing grappling stars, it was more than just an activity for McCrory. It was an outlet.

“I had this innate weirdness,” he said. “I was definitely a target for being picked on … anger, helplessness, I guess you could call it depression. It followed me through my adolescent years.”

And wrestling, being able to physically impose himself and watch his improvement — that was the outlet.

Now in college without direction or an identity, like wrestling, to hide behind, McCrory was completely exposed.

And on top of that, he didn't have a clue what he wanted to do with himself. Looking back on his late teens, he says he had too much opportunity and maybe not enough direction. “My problem is that I am an intelligent person,” he said. “I could have done a million things; I always had the ability to adapt.

“In college, I was just trying to figure out what to do with my life … I didn’t chose the fight game; the fight game chose me.”

'I just went to school and partied'

No wrestling, boundless opportunity and no real direction, McCrory lived the stereotypical small-town college life.

Then at a frat party, sometime around the Jason Giambi steroids fiasco that dominated sports talk television in the mid-2000s, McCrory said he voiced his opinion, admittedly inflammatory, and learned quickly of his mortality.

“One of the guys at this party punked me,” he said. “I’ll never forget the disrespect that experience gave me. That kind of (sent) the wheels in motion.

“I’m never going to let any person have that ability to disrespect me to that degree ever again.”

Just around that time, a mixed martial arts training facility in Ithaca had expanded and opened a location in Cortland. McCrory enrolled soon after the party revelation.

“Ithaca college guys were training there,” he said. Naturally, he didn’t walk into the sparring sessions showing signs that one day he’d be fighting the best 185-pound men in the world. “They were basically happy to have people to beat on. I got beat on a lot. The difference is it didn’t matter what condition I left in at night.

“Whether I was getting my butt whooped, I was always there the next day looking for more, to get vengeance. I was always motivated to go back.”

The outlet that was once high school wrestling, the ability to get beat down and to come back for more, was finally back in McCrory’s court.

Not long after beginning training with Seaman, his first fight was booked. As his coach and mentor tells the story, he was taking a then-19-year-old immature McCrory to his first fight in Massachusetts.

Seaman didn’t find his new pupil ready to fight based on pedigree and experience, but the wiry, nerdy kid wanted a fight. Almost as soon as McCrory took to the cage, the match was over. He had won.

A year later, he was fighting at the pinnacle of the sport, recording a triangle choke victory over Pete Spratt at UFC Fight Night 10 in Florida in June 2007. That was his ninth professional fight, his ninth consecutive professional victory. He was, at the time, the youngest fighter ever to be signed by UFC.

That quick start would be dampened. He would fight five more times in the UFC before his departure in 2009, swapping wins and losses before leaving the company with a 3-3 record and no longer having a contract. The plan was never to leave fighting, but roughly five years passed without McCrory lacing up his gloves as a professional.

McCrory and Seaman can look back on the tumultuous early career and find where it might have gone wrong. Most notably, the still-developing McCrory may have been uncomfortable in his still-developing body.

Seaman showed up to one training session and noted McCrory looked huge. Then fighting at welterweight (170-pound limit), he stepped on the scale at 201 pounds. Thirty pounds would be shed before he fought John Howard, a split-decision loss that would be his final fight before his five-year absence.

“He came back after the second round and said his kidneys were hurting him,” the coach recalled. “That night was rough on him. He was so depleted.”

OUT THERE: Ithaca native trains all at B.C. Martial Arts

Binghamton’s McCrory jumps to UFC

'Kid has a hard time getting a break'

McCrory dances around the struggles of the next five years with vague sweeps, glancing past some of the most trying times in his adult life. Great things would happen, too, like getting married and having a child. But poor business ventures and failed returns to the fight game due to injury mar his life between the ages of 22 and 27.

“I don’t want to give attention to those that have exploited me or my interests,” he said of business ventures gone bad. “Over those years, I worked for a company and I got involved in business investments with people who hung me out to dry.”

That’s where talk of work outside the octagon ends. “Dealings went south, relationships fell apart, and it cost me greatly. It’s been a long road to recovery.”

When he needed money, he remembered — despite how much he believes he has the ability to do whatever he wanted to do — that it was fighting where he thrived financially, well before he had a family to support.

There were times, he said, when glancing thoughts of “What if I never fight again?” took root. But he said he knew he wasn’t finished in the octagon. Now, as is the go-to phrase he’s used in interviews for years, it was about building “momentum.”

“I always thought there was a chance he’d (fight again),” Seaman said. While out of the spotlight and focusing on his priorities, Seaman said his fighter was always training, just never catching a break long enough to take a fight. “I told him when he was ready to come back, ‘You call me.’”

“I would be fighting to get in shape, then an injury would come about, then business would take my time and energy,” McCrory said. “I was strung out in too many directions. I was unable to build to my fighting goal and fighting for my family.”

An attempt at a comeback in 2013 ended after a car accident caused an injury requiring shoulder surgery. Then, finally healed and focused on that momentum he had been trying to capture since an early exit from UFC and years of strife had spread him thin, he was back to preparing for a return fight, and this time, the break would come. The momentum would be bottled — this time, he’d make it through the camp for his first fight in five years.

A straight return to UFC wasn’t an option. UFC has long been the premier fighting promotion in the world, and by 2014, the company had swallowed up most smaller promotions in eliminating any competition.

Still, there was Bellator, an organization with a broadcasting partnership with Spike TV that has promoted fights since 2008.

“My manager had a relationship with Bellator,” he said. “I was able to procure a contract where there wasn’t a right to match. They’re fairly notorious for contracts where they have a right to match.”

A right to match would mean that a contract offered by a competing company, like UFC, could be matched by Bellator. Signing without that stipulation not only gave McCrory an in back to the fighting game, it gave him an out to UFC.

“(The contract) is the only reason I took it. It was to make money, get skin in the game again. I needed a platform to comeback.”

And what a platform it would be.

Two wins, 87 seconds

“You don’t get paid by the minute,” McCrory said of the way he approaches his time in the octagon. “Every time out there is a chance to win a life-changing sum of money.

“Dispatch your opponent in spectacular fashion. If you go out and beat them badly, you get extra money. The incentive makes a difference.”

The incentive made for a 21-second knockout in McCrory’s first Bellator fight in September 2014 over Brennan Ward. Just over five months later, McCrory used an armbar to dispatch Jason Butcher in one minute, six seconds. Two fights, 87 seconds, two decisive victories that got the MMA world buzzing. All after over five years away from the game, and doubts as to whether he’d ever be locked inside a cage again.

It would be easy for McCrory to have had doubts before his return. With the early experience McCrory had in professional fighting, now coupled with the desperation of attempting to provide a better life for his family, McCrory said there was no way he was going to let that opportunity go again.

“Hell no,” McCrory said of second-guessing his abilities. “No doubts. This is the thing: People that know me regard me as being mature, intelligent, eye-on-the-prize type of an individual. Everyone knows that I am very good at what I do. Now I just have a platform to show the rest of the world what those close to me already know. I wouldn’t have gone back if I didn’t have the intention of dispatching opponents in the manner I have. I wouldn’t have gambled to fail. I knew I would be successful. And here we are.”

How he got here

The change in McCrory isn’t so much the way in which he fights, Seaman said. He’s long been capable of finishing his opponents, as evident by nine consecutive knockout or submission finishes in his first nine professional bouts.

The change is more visual, more the aura that he brings to the fight. At 6 feet, 4 inches tall with a 78-inch reach, McCrory entered the UFC in 2009 as a welterweight (170 pounds). The gangly kid’s bravado was that of being a “nerd,” loudly declaring so after his first UFC victory over Spratt before putting his eyeglasses on to announce his arrival to the fighting world.

To the fighting world, McCrory was a top prospect. His appearance, his character, though, didn’t carry much weight outside the inner ring of fighters.

Seaman recalls stopping at a diner during McCrory’s early UFC career. “Some guy was throwing food at him, calling him a nerd. … He had no idea who he was talking to. There’s a very small faction that sees the UFC, so he was in the limelight to them, to his fans. Outside of that, no one (cared).”

Emphasizing his youth, his anything-but intimidating appearance during his first run in the UFC was a staple of pre- and post-fight interviews.

When he returned in 2014, “The Barn Cat” seemed to have ditched that routine. He’s filled out his frame, now dons a smattering of tattoos and moved up to middleweight (185-pound limit).

Once only a jiu jitsu white belt, the lowest belt in the discipline, McCrory is now in possession of brown belt, and has high discipline in Thai boxing and jeet kune do, the famous martial art of Bruce Lee.

Physically, martially and professionally, McCrory has matured. He’s found a greater purpose than himself, falling from the triumphs of a young fighter to becoming a husband and father who fights for a palpable reason. McCrory walked out of the octagon in 2009 an uncomfortable kid with a liking for a triangle choke and walked back in a grown man fighting to give his kin a more comfortable childhood than he had.

“I think I’ve always been mature,” he said. “But I did not have the greater 'why.' I was 19-22 (the first time around), I never experienced adult life during that time. I was just fighting, making money and scraping by. You feel rich because you don’t spend a whole lot. You have the luxury of being young and single.

“To get away from the UFC and look at the adult world, you go, ‘man, this sucks.’”

Up next?

Exactly two weeks before McCrory hits the octagon, Britain’s Michael Bisping shook up the middleweight division with a stellar first-round knockout of reigning champion Luke Rockhold.

But McCrory isn’t talking championships; he’s in no position to, not yet anyway. But he is in position to talk knockouts, to talk finishing an opponent and exactly what a quick, clean, decisive victory means going forward.

“The better you are at fighting, the less of it you have to do,” he said. “The goal is to do very little fighting … get out unscathed and get that paycheck.”

Jotko is no easy task. Of his 17 professional wins, six were by submission or knockout. He’s riding a three-fight win streak, all decisions.

The record doesn’t concern McCrory. He says he acknowledges that this opponent has a lot of wins, but so does he.

“When a guy is going to decision, he (doesn’t) have that killer instinct. I can’t sleep on anybody, no one at this level. … I say everyone looks great, then they fight me.”

Why is that? Why have 14 men, most with more experience, a more physically daunting stature fallen victim of The Barn Cat’s flurry of punches or long wiry legs wrapped around their necks?

“What really makes him different than other fighters is his mindset,” Seaman said. “That’s where dominate thoughts are. When he’s in the cage, I always know he’s going to bring it.”

Let’s say McCrory blisters Jotko with quick hands and puts him out. Or say he finds the Polish fighter vulnerable and traps an extended arm against his chest for the submission. What’s next?

“They tell me who I’m fighting next, and I’ll fight them,” McCrory said, staying away from numerical goals like top 10 in his division or thinking of names. But his coach sees unlimited possibility for the once-budding superstar turned down-and-out struggling family man, turned 29-year-old in the prime of a once forgotten career.

“I’m surprised he’s not fought a gatekeeper (a top 10 fighter) yet,” Seaman said. “He has the potential to go all the way, to be competitive in the top 10.”

“Put the ladder out, and I’ll climb it. One rung at a time,” McCrory said.

UFC Fight Night 89

Preliminary Bout: Tamdan McCrory (14-3 MMA, 4-3 UFC) vs. Krzystof Jotko (17-1 MMA, 4-1 UFC).

Main Event: Rory MacDonald (18-3 MMA, 9-3 UFC) vs. Stephen Thompson (12-1 MMA, 7-1 UFC).

How to watch: Preliminary card starts at 8:30 p.m. on Fox Sports 2. Main card starts at 10:30 on Fox Sports 1.

Notes: Jotko defends 89 percent of all opponent takedown attempts in UFC middleweight competition, the highest rate in divisional history. McCrory has earned 13 of his 14 career victories by either knockout or submission.

CONCERTWATCH: The Boss heads upstate for 2 shows this week