A decade into his UFC career, so much has changed for Randy Brown — yet some things never will

A decade ago, Randy Brown was a poorly kept secret on the Eastern Seaboard as he made his UFC debut in Newark. He’d been the Ring of Combat welterweight champion since his third professional fight in MMA, and — with that promotion being hubbed in Atlantic City — there was a buzz on Brown’s name when he stepped in to face Matt Dwyer.

It feels like a long time ago now, given how much has changed in those 10 years. Brown, who’d attended high school in Queens and called New York City home since he was a teenager, was fighting as close as he could to his state at that time, as in New York, MMA was still illegal. And that 25-year-old kid of Jamaican descent has seen a lot in the intervening years since beating Dwyer that night in New Jersey.

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“Time flies when you’re having fun,” he told Uncrowned this week ahead of UFC Vegas 111. “I’m living my dream. I’m pursuing something that I dreamed of, and I had this vision with me and my coaches and my team, and we chased it. We’re doing it and time is flying and I’m super, extremely proud of myself.

“So I think about it all the time — 10 years coming up.”

Brown is 14-6 over the course of his UFC career. He’s never lost back-to-back fights, and he’s never won more than four in a row. To say he’s a perennial contender would be a stretch, but to say he’s a bonafide winner isn’t. He has hovered closer to the higher-ups in his division for a long, long time.

As he gets set to take on Gabriel Bonfim in what will be his first ever UFC main event on Saturday at the UFC APEX, I asked him if the kid who started out all those years ago on this journey would’ve thought he’d still be around in 2026, competing at the highest level at 35 years old.

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“You know what, I’ll tell you, I thought I would’ve been retired,” he says with a laugh. “I thought I would’ve won the belt, and I would’ve been the world champion, two-time world champion, two-divisional world champion, and that I’ll be retired right now. I mean, that’s why we get into it, right?

“But the universe has different plans for us at times. I’m still here, still grinding, still trying to be a world champion.”

Those wheeling constellations have been redirecting Brown for quite some time. As the world emerged from the pandemic, Brown put together a solid run and looked to be making headway toward becoming a contender before running into future champion Jack Della Maddalena in 2023. When he got back on the horse and won three in a row after that setback, he lost a narrow split decision in a 2024 catchweight fight with Bryan Battle, who came in five pounds heavy.

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It’s been like that for Brown. Two steps forward, one step back.

Yet he keeps plugging along, and right now he’s won consecutive fights as he looks to make a twilight title run in a welterweight division teeming with monsters. One of those who is vying for position in that space is Bonfim, a Contender Series alum who has won five of his first six UFC bouts. The Brazilian is coming off a win against Stephen Thompson in July, which was his biggest conquest to date.

Bonfim’s lone loss came against Nicholas Dalby in 2023, the same Dalby that Brown smoked with a beautiful right hand back in April. MMA math is one of the most deceptive indicators in the fight game curriculum, but to break back into the upper strata of the division, Brown must go through guys like Bonfim, who is seven years his junior.

If there’s a benefit to being a 20-fight UFC vet, it’s that he’s been here before.

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“My experience translates tremendously, because the main thing is that I’ve seen Bonfim plenty of times,” Brown says. “I’ve seen him in a gym. I’ve seen him, I’ve fought Bonfim the prototype plenty of times throughout my career, whereas he hasn’t fought someone like me ever. So that’s what comes with experience. I’ve seen that archetype before, and I know how to deal with that.”

It’s a strange set up for a New Yorker to fight on a card in Vegas a week before a pay-per-view is slated to take place at Madison Square Garden, but that’s the way the cookie has crumbled for Brown. He says it stings a little to not be on the bigger card in his own city, but he hasn’t let it take away from his task at hand.

“I’m in the moment man, and this is my opportunity,” he says.

Perhaps the one constant in a career with so many sidewinding aspects is that through it all, his father remains locked up at FCI Lewisburg, a federal prison in Pennsylvania a little more than 100 miles from New York. Arrested when Brown was just two years old under the RICO Act — Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations — the elder Brown is currently serving three life sentences for what Randy has described as “running operations” in which they “moved drugs … they robbed, extortion, all type of stuff.”

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It’s been a subplot throughout Brown’s career, that he redeem the Brown name through the fight game. He has kept in regular touch with his dad, speaking to him almost daily for the bulk of his adult life. He says that they have a perfectly normal father-son relationship, aside from the walls that separate them.

With laws having changed along with the times since the conviction, there’s an evergreen hope that — after 34 years on the cell block — one day he will get out to see Randy fight in person. He came up for parole again this past summer, and the dreaded constant in Randy Brown’s life continued to drag on.

“He got denied,” Brown says, shaking his head. “He got denied, even though it was a new judge and everything.

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“Listen, he’s done so much while he’s been there. He’s a mentor to these younger guys that come in there. He’s been to school, he has all these degrees. He went in as a young man, and he’s completely reformed. He’s a new person. And I’m not just saying that because it’s my father. This guy, he’s a completely different man. So I think it’s time for him to come home.”

The one thing that is known is that his father will be tuned in for Randy’s fight with Bonfim. He never misses a fight. And he won’t miss the first main event since all those years ago on the Boardwalk in Atlantic City, when Brown was whooping up the regional scene with Ring of Combat. He’s come so far since then, and yet he’s still fighting for the same things.

Still holding out hope.

“He’s a great grappler,” Brown says of Bonfim. “He’s a tremendous grappler and a tremendous athlete. Good black belt, strong athletic, good knowledge on the game. But I’m a black belt, man, and I’ve been training for a long time. I’ve been around for a long time.”