“Zach was always meaner, bigger, and rougher than me,” says Garbrandt. A smart man might have one’s money on Zach being the prize fighter here instead of Cody. But after high school, and a few years working the mines, Zach had gone into business with their step-father, welding railroad lines up and down the East Coast.

Thanks to the younger Garbrandt’s aptitude for beating the holy spirit out of his opponents—simultaneously in the disciplines of boxing, street fighting, and wrestling—he avoided the mines and received a college scholarship instead (for wrestling, not brawling). It could have been a Cinderella story, the deliverance unto glory of the would-be miner, but things didn’t pan out. “My understanding was I was going to college for wrestling,” he says. “But the college actually was saying, ‘You're a scholar-athlete, not an athlete-scholar.’"

Garbrandt quickly returned to Uhrichsville, well shy of completing his freshman year, where he fell back into his wild living ways and was shortly thereafter stabbed in a bar fight. “I'm a firm believer in karma, so getting stabbed was an eye opener,” he notes. He began to take fighting more seriously and eventually moved to Pennsylvania, partly to escape the bad habits of his adolescence and partly for a new beginning. That’s where he was, working as an instructor in Pittsburgh, when he decided to travel to Sacramento to train under his idol, Urijah Faber, the so-called California Kid whose golden mien was matched only by his string of glorious victories in the UFC.

“I'm a firm believer in karma, so getting stabbed was an eye opener.”

Because mixed martial arts is such a lucrative industry and the UFC draws so heavily on the dramaturgy of the theatre of cruelty, it is easy to forget that the individual fighters are not part of a showbiz racket. Sure, Conor McGregor plays his role as flamboyant and mystical punching dervish with the zeal of a young Daniel Day Lewis, but even he started off as a plumbing apprentice with a penchant for destruction. It was only after he realized that playing a heel engendered a larger following, and therefore more money, and therefore more means to express his heel-dom, that he became the Iago of the UFC.

And after watching UFC 207, it’s difficult not to pin Garbrandt as a heel, even if you wonder how much of it is genuine. What of his taunts were kayfabe? Or shoot? Was his refusal to touch gloves meant to gin up a sense of aggression? Does the moniker “No Love” ring true?

To hear Garbrandt tell it—and if he is acting in the ring, that’s some Dancing Bear level of verisimilitude going on—he doesn’t see the UFC as a sport, and certainly not as theater. “It’s a battle,” he says. “It's not about hashtag and retweets. It's real-deal stuff in there. Some fighters think they're athletes and it's a sport. I know I'm athletic, but I’m a fighter first.”

He’s not friends with the eleven fighters he has already beaten or, for that matter, with the legion he might still beat. You will not find him riding an inflatable banana with three other UFC fighters on vacation. “As long as you are an active fighter,” says Garbrandt, “no, we’re not cool.” Good sportsmanship, after all, doesn’t apply if you don't see it as a sport.

For now though, Garbrandt is enjoying his time atop the mountain and appreciating the opportunities, after so hard a road up it, being the champ affords. “You know,” he says happily, sopping up the makhni sauce with an irregular tear of naan, “this is actually pretty good.”

Watch Jordan Peele Play with the Greatest Horror Movie Weapons Ever: