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Brett Okamoto
NEW YORK — Ben Vickers has to be, by his own admission, one of the least-qualified trainers to be involved in a UFC title fight at Madison Square Garden.
Vickers is the head coach of Scrappy MMA in Perth, Australia, home of UFC welterweight champion Jack Della Maddalena (18-2), who will make his first defense at UFC 322 on Saturday (10 p.m. ET on ESPN PPV, prelims at 6 p.m. ET on ESPN+). Across the cage from Della Maddalena will be former lightweight champion Islam Makhachev (27-1) — and the championship lineage he represents.
Makhachev is ESPN’s second-ranked pound-for-pound fighter in the world. His coaches are Khabib Nurmagomedov — the only UFC champion to retire undefeated — and American Kickboxing Academy founder Javier Mendez, who has trained more than half a dozen MMA champions since the 1990s, including Nurmagomedov and fellow UFC Hall of Famer Daniel Cormier. According to the online database Tapology, Della Maddalena’s head coach has a professional MMA fighting record of 0-2.
«I have no credentials, none,» Vickers told ESPN. «I have no fight career to fall back on. I’m not a lifelong martial artist. I believe I deserve to be here, but I don’t know how I got here.»
Vickers is being modest, but nevertheless, his coaching experience at the highest level is limited to Della Maddalena’s UFC career, which began in 2022. Scrappy MMA’s other trainers include Della Maddalena’s longtime teammate Ryan Gray and Della Maddalena’s older brother, Josh, who are essentially his fighting peers, with less than 20 combined appearances between them. It’s a homegrown team that has little-to-no martial arts background, with the members borrowing techniques from seminars and tinkering with their own.
While Makhachev’s corner and its legacy of more than 30 years of MMA experience is a group befitting one of the world’s most iconic venues for combat sports, Della Maddalena’s team could probably walk through the packed seats of Madison Square Garden on fight night and barely get noticed.
«And we prefer it that way,» Vickers said. «We don’t give a s— if anyone knows our name.»
Scrappy MMA’s absence of an established championship track record hasn’t held back Della Maddalena yet. The 29-year-old is 8-0 since joining the UFC in January 2022 and hasn’t dropped a fight since May 2016, but the reputation gap between the corners in the main event Saturday makes for an interesting dichotomy ahead of UFC 322. How has this small team from Perth risen to the peak of the sport with so few credentials, and will that finally prove to be a disadvantage against Makhachev and the powerhouse team from Dagestan?
«Never once has it been intimidating,» Gray told ESPN. «At the end of the day, their guy has to step in and fight our guy — and we’re pretty sure our guy is going to f— their guy up.»
Understandably, perhaps the No. 1 reason for Scrappy MMA’s confidence — Saturday and beyond — is Della Maddalena.
Vickers can vividly recall the day when the Della Maddalena brothers first walked into his gym in 2012. It was a Saturday morning, which was one of his least favorite days of the week. The gym, which was operated under a different name at the time (and under a different head coach), offered free sessions on Saturdays to attract new customers. That arrangement did not always attract the most talented or committed group.
«When something is free, a lot of idiots show up,» said Vickers, who bought the gym in 2019. «This one morning, I’m there at 9 a.m., in walks Josh and Jack Della Maddalena — and immediately I say, ‘This is going to be a good morning.'»
Vickers had been waiting on a talent like Jack Della Maddalena since he retired from fighting in 2007 at age 28. Vickers’ career as a fighter started late and ended early. He did not train in martial arts as a kid in London. He joined the British Army at 16 and learned some boxing but felt the British Army, to his surprise, «doesn’t teach you how to fight.» He left the military at 21 but didn’t start properly training in martial arts until his mid-20s. He quickly realized he would never become a world champion, but he believed he could coach one.
«I felt like I really understood what I was being told, I just couldn’t execute it myself,» Vickers said. «I had a problem with the execution part, but I really understood the technical part. I’ve always been really interested in violence, and my thing is ‘beautiful violence.’ Jack is the biggest proponent of what I would call ‘beautiful violence.’ He is a man who will take your head clean off but will do it looking like a boxer and not a thug.»
Looking back on his coaching philosophies, which started to take shape in earnest around 2011 when he moved from London to Perth, Vickers can’t pinpoint where they originated. But his trademark — that «beautiful violence» — probably has something to do with how the team has made up ground in MMA in a relatively short amount of time. It’s a straightforward approach. Scrappy MMA exists to inflict damage. In Vickers’ words, a win by decision is akin to a draw. That doesn’t mean he expects his fighters to finish every fight, but they should be trying to do so at all times.
«He’s perfect for our team because he knows us through and through, and his approach to training is to go in there and damage each other,» Della Maddalena said of Vickers. «He’s not too controlling; he lets us be ourselves. His philosophy is to be vicious.»
Vickers’ approach — and the team’s execution of it — has taken the MMA scene in Perth to a level that was hard to imagine when he first moved there. In 2012, an aspiring fighter such as Gray couldn’t find an MMA gym within an hour’s ride on public transportation. The majority of the MMA gyms he found weren’t MMA gyms. The best anyone could hope for was a kickboxing gym that offered a white belt jiu-jitsu class or a jiu-jitsu facility that dabbled in striking.
Booking an MMA fight in the region was nearly impossible, and fights that occurred were potentially comical in how they played out.
«The first fighter I ever put out in Perth, we took an MMA fight on a Thai boxing show,» Vickers said. «My guy dropped the other guy in the first round, and the referee split them up. I jumped in, thinking it was over, and the commission told me to get out while the referee gave the guy a standing 8-count — in an MMA fight. It eventually carried on, and my guy lost by submission in the second round. That’s where the sport was when I first arrived.»
It’s remarkable to think that 13 years later, Perth has the defending welterweight champion in the main event of one of the UFC’s most talent-rich cards of the year.
Stylistically, the main-event matchup will depend heavily on how well Della Maddalena can respond to Makhachev’s wrestling pressure. The Dagestani style is known for neutralizing and wearing on opponents on the ground. Della Maddalena’s team doesn’t want him to turn the fight into a grappling match, but hit coaches are confident he can win it anywhere.
Based on résumés, it doesn’t seem like Scrappy MMA should be here — especially compared with the opponent. But Vickers believes he and his team deserve to be here because, as he put it, they have worked «f—ing hard.» A fight team doesn’t reach the point of defending against Makhachev and Dagestani MMA without hard work, and Scrappy MMA has put in a lot of it over the past 13 years.
The beautiful thing about MMA is that ultimately, résumés don’t matter. Legacies don’t win fights. Black belts and trophies stashed in gyms don’t count for anything once a fight starts. There will be a fight Saturday, and Scrappy MMA believes its guy will win.
«I believe 100 percent in what we’re doing, and I believe Jack is a generational talent,» Vickers said. «We’re here because for two hours every morning and two hours every night, we’re working. We’re not here to be famous. Jack will beat Islam on Saturday, and we’ll fly home and go back to living under a rock until it’s time to take out the next one.»
