It was the weight of the moment, more than anything about the particular sensation of it, that still sticks with Reinier de Ridder.
Eleven months ago, the 35-year-old found himself waiting in the wings of the UFC Apex facility in Las Vegas, preparing to make his UFC debut. The journey that led him there had been a whirlwind. Four years of taking any fight he could in Germany, Belgium, Switzerland, South Africa and his native Netherlands; a half-decade run in ONE Championship that took him on a tour through Asia, brought him two championship belts, and put his name on the map; and one out-on-a-limb bout in Abu Dhabi following an acrimonious split with ONE and a hunt for a bigger spotlight.
After all of it, that long-sought opportunity was sitting in front of him: a shot at veteran submission artist Gerald Meerschaert under the UFC banner, and a shot at much more if it all shook out as hoped.
“Just walking out,” de Ridder says now, reflecting on what he remembers most about that night. “It was in the Apex, there wasn’t really a crowd. But just walking out and thinking, ‘I’m gonna f****** fight in the UFC — finally. After all those years, after all the s*** I’ve been through with ONE Championship, all the frustration, the lawsuit, all the bulls***. I’m going to fight in the UFC.’
“Yeah, it was a big, big thing for me.”
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But getting through that first UFC bout didn’t come easy for the Dutchman. Though only a couple years older than de Ridder, by the time Meerschaert was standing across from the UFC debutant, the veteran had already amassed 37 professional wins to de Ridder’s 17. He’d already collected the most submission wins in UFC middleweight history, and the most finishes overall in the division’s history, too.
And he wasted little time in testing his lesser-seasoned opponent, putting pressure on de Ridder from the jump.
The Breda, Netherlands product weathered the early blows. And before the first round was through, he sent a message of his own — landing a stiff elbow that sent Meerschaert stumbling to the ground, seemingly dazed, seconds before the horn blew. A telling warning. The pair waded through a technical grappling battle in Round 2, each whirling through different machinations, launching subtle attacks and defences, attempts and denials.
There was a sense the newcomer was gaining ground, gaining momentum. And a minute-and-a-half into Round 3, de Ridder crashed over Meerschaert like a tidal wave, wrapped him up in an arm-triangle choke, and forced the veteran to tap. The referee rushed in and separated the combatants. De Ridder rolled over and laid on his back, eyes closed, still clutching Meerschaert’s right hand long after the bout was called. Taking it all in. Processing what it all meant.
”I had to dig deep for that first one,” he says.
Less than a year later, he arrives at Saturday’s UFC Fight Night, under Vancouver’s Rogers Arena lights, undefeated since joining the top-flight promotion, having rattled off four wins in that brief span. Headlining his second straight event, his next test comes from Brendan Allen, just a few months after de Ridder outlasted former middleweight champion Robert Whittaker with a split-decision victory. And the stakes for the one they call “RDR” couldn’t be clearer: Falter, or make it through unconvincingly, and remain mired in a crowded group of middleweight contenders. But make magic happen in the Octagon, find something more spectacular, more memorable, and de Ridder could find himself next in line for Khamzat Chimaev, and a shot at the UFC middleweight title.
A life-changing, career-altering opportunity.
Choking out Americans on one of the sporting world’s biggest stages was never part of the plan for de Ridder. He fell into the fight game, he says, the first few decades of his time in the sport speckled with stops and starts.
“My parents put me in judo as a kid when I was five years old,” he explains. “I did that ’til I was 15, 16. I was decent. I did alright, won national [tournaments], but didn’t really go any further than that at the time. I wasn’t the most talented at it, but I always really enjoyed it. Until I got to 15, and some other stuff got more important — girls, parties, all that nonsense.”
A family move landed a teenaged de Ridder in a new town in the Netherlands. Unable to find a judo gym there to continue his training, he found a jiu-jitsu gym instead — and a coach who had no interest in training him, despite de Ridder proving he could choke out everyone in the room. So he bailed, tried rugby for a spell, and gave up on that too, the fit still seeming not quite right.
Eventually, after letting the sports world slip away and moving on to a physical therapy internship, he found a path back to martial arts.
“Somebody who worked there as well, he was training at a different gym, and he was already a purple belt,” de Ridder remembers. “He told me, ‘You went to the wrong gym. Come with me and I’ll show you what jiu-jitsu is.’ I went there the first time, and tiny Brazilian guys were tapping me out. And I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is very interesting.’”
De Ridder was hooked. Before long, he’d attained a black belt himself, and earned opportunities to compete at the highest level in the grappling world. But even then, he could feel there was something more for him.
“I got a little frustrated with jiu-jitsu in the competitions, with the points — I got to the European Championships three times and I lost the final three times, against a guy who was just running away and trying to win on points,” he says. He wanted more high-octane, more adrenaline. So, he turned to MMA.
“I took an amateur fight, and won that one in like two minutes — running at the guy, full of nerves, taking him down, choking him out,” he says. “I took a pro fight after that, kept winning, and that was the start of my career.”
Though the wins seemed to come easy, and piled up early, it wasn’t until relatively recently — a decade in — that de Ridder truly felt he had something special, that he had enough to compete at the highest level, against the world’s best.
“That really took a long time. Maybe even just the last couple of years, you know?” he says. “I really just rolled into it. It was never, ‘I’m going to be a fighter. I’m going to be the champion, I’m going to make this my living.’ It was never like that. I’ve always done stuff on the side as well — I’m a physical therapist, I used to have a physical therapy practice, I owned a gym back home. I’ve always had other stuff going on than just fighting.
“But I just always kept going. I always loved it.”
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It was his title-winning breakthrough in 2020 — a submission victory over Aung La Nsang for the ONE Championship middleweight belt (which is that organization’s 205-pound division), clinched with a first-round rear-naked choke — that truly began to show the world, and de Ridder himself, what he was capable of.
“That was the moment I felt like this might be something to keep going in,” he says. “It was very good in ONE, especially the first couple of years. I was able to get fights, and they had a lot of cool ideas, and I was very happy to be part of it. … In the beginning, I was able to do well in my fights, show off a lot of my skills.”
He followed up his middleweight title fight with another bout against Nsang six months later, beating the Burmese veteran once more to win ONE’s light heavyweight belt (225 pounds), too. Still, de Ridder couldn’t shake the feeling that success on the fringes would only take him so far.
“I think the first few fights in ONE, [I was] kind of still not really on the radar. The first Aung fight, my first title fight, I got him in the first round — I think that started making some waves. … But it was still ONE Championship, you know? The attention for it is not as big as in the UFC,” de Ridder says. “At a point, there weren’t really any fighters anymore — nobody to fight, no fights being offered — so I got frustrated a lot in the last couple of years.
“Which forced me to take a lot of risk trying to get away from them. And that was a very good thing, looking back.”
Amid that dominant run through ONE, though, de Ridder also found himself humbled some. After claiming his two belts and sleepwalking through a couple convincing title defences, the then-undefeated rising talent found himself on the wrong end of a stiff test against Anatoly Malykhin.
The Russian knockout artist ended de Ridder’s streak with a first-round KO in 2022, winning the Dutch grappler’s light heavyweight belt. Then he came back and beat de Ridder again, this time via a third-round TKO, to snag his middleweight belt, too.
“That was a point where I really did a lot of introspection, a lot of reflection,” de Ridder says. “I was forced to. And maybe I should have done it before. I got to a point where I was 16-0, finished basically everybody they put in front of me, and I was at my most arrogant ever. I thought, ‘When I fight, I just go in, I take the guy down, and I choke him out. That’s what I always do. That’s how fights go.’ So I started calling out heavyweights. It was just too much — I was getting ahead of myself.
“After those losses, it really put me in a different state of mind. I had a chance to reflect on what really makes me one of the best fighters in the world, which I kind of got away from at the end of that run in ONE. I was still training hard, I was still sparring hard, but the love, the dedication to getting better, the devotion to technique, I lost that at a point before those losses. It really taught me a lot.
“And I’m proud of what I’ve done since. That I’ve been able to turn it around.”
The turnaround has looked more meteoric-ascent than slow-boil redemption campaign. In just eight months, de Ridder broke into the UFC and wreaked havoc on the middleweight division with three finishes and four wins — after that debut submission over Meerschaert, he reeled off a rear-naked choke win over Kevin Holland, a TKO victory over Bo Nickal, and a July split-decision over Whittaker that saw de Ridder outstrike the ex-champion 192-70 overall.
A hefty workload for the 35-year-old, who’s still fighting to put his name up among the sport’s very best after a decade in the game.
“It’s been a lot of work — be careful what you wish for,” he says with a laugh. “I’ve really been grinding so hard in the gym. I always thought I trained pretty hard back in Holland, but it’s nothing like what I’ve been putting in this last year — over at Kill Cliff, twice a day, just going through killer after killer after killer.
“And this year, because my family wasn’t always there, it was lonely at times as well. Because it was just me, in America, trying to chase a dream. But it’s led to incredible highs in the cage so far, so it’s been very cool.”
Now comes the next test. And it’s already brought an early plot twist — initially signed on to fight Anthony ‘Fluffy’ Hernandez on Saturday, de Ridder saw the sixth-ranked middleweight pull out of the meeting in September due to injury. In stepped Allen, who will enter the cage hungry for a marquee win to help his own climb up the division rankings.
For de Ridder, the change means little. Regardless of who stands across from him Saturday, the goal remains the same.
“They are somewhat similar in skill-set,” he says. “Both of them box pretty well. Fluffy wrestles a bit better, and I think Brendan’s jiu-jitsu is a bit better. But the biggest difference between them is Fluffy builds — normally he gets better when the rounds go on.
“Brendan gets a little bit more sloppy as the rounds go on. He tends to make mistakes.”
De Ridder, in turn, intends to exploit those mistakes if and when they come, to inflict upon Allen the 19th finish of his career, the fourth of his UFC tenure.
And like that first UFC bout at the beginning of his rollercoaster year, the weight of the moment is clear. The potential of how his path could diverge based on those few minutes in the cage. Chimaev waits, with the middleweight belt. The presumed next-in-line for that title, Nassourdine Imavov, does too. And de Ridder himself counts down the hours and minutes until he can return to the Octagon, with eyes on pulling out something undeniable, on forcing the UFC’s hand.
Little needs to be said about what it would mean to reach that mountaintop, to get that shot at Chimaev, to see this white-knuckle year culminate in a chance at being UFC champion.
“That would be crazy,” de Ridder says. “It would be a nice crowning moment for all this stuff that I’ve done for so long. But to be honest, it’s been so cool to just be in this world at all. I make money fighting people — it’s the weirdest thing, right? I live off training hard and fighting people. I get to experience all this crazy stuff now.
“I’m in Vancouver — I’ve never been in Canada before — and my family can be a part of all this. I’m very grateful for that. It would be nice to top it all off with a belt around my waist, definitely.”
Before that, there’s Saturday night, under the Rogers Arena lights. There’s Allen, desperate for some momentum of his own. And there’s a year of hard battles weighing on de Ridder’s body. When his name is called, and the bell tolls, the Dutchman will shift all thoughts to the former.
“I try to be in the moment as much as I can. That’s something I think we all need in life,” he says. “It’s all about right now. We’ll see about anything after this fight, we’ll figure it out then.
“I’m fully focused on doing what I can, being in the moment right now, and being in the moment when I step into the cage.”
from Sportsnet.ca
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