Tom Nolan packed up and left Australia. The rising lightweight contender now trains full time in Auckland at Eugene Bareman’s City Kickboxing, and he made the switch right before the biggest fight of his career.
Nolan headlines UFC Vegas 123 (UFC Fight Night 292 by the promotion’s other count) this Saturday against veteran Renato Moicano. It’s scheduled for five rounds, and it’s the first time Nolan’s name sits at the top of a UFC card.
The move started as a test drive. Nolan told MMA Junkie he flew across for two weeks to see how the room fit, liked it enough to stay for good, and then the phone rang.
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“I went over there for two weeks as a trial, and then, yeah, I made the permanent move. I got the call up after that,” Nolan said.
The order of events matters. He chose the gym first and got the main event second. That’s a fighter building a career, which is a lot easier to respect than a guy scrambling for a famous corner after the UFC hands him a headliner.
The sparring math
What sold him, by his own account, was sheer volume. City Kickboxing stacks UFC fighters on the same mats at the same time, and Nolan’s comparison to the scene back home was blunt.
“The amount of UFC fighters on the mat at one time is more than members in most gyms in Australia,” he said.
He called it “the best camp I’ve ever had by a mile” and kept going from there. Nolan pointed to the multiple coaches, the pros who haven’t cracked the UFC yet, and the amateurs behind them trying to turn pro, all of it feeding the same training room. He said he was thrilled the timing lined up, describing City Kickboxing as the biggest gym in that part of the world.
“It’s endless. There’s so many people to train with, and there’s so many minds to learn from and different coaches to work with,” Nolan said.
You can say a lot of things about that quote, but nobody wrote it for him. Ask a guy how camp went and he tells you it was unreal, dude. I’ll take that over a four-paragraph statement about “exciting new opportunities” every day of fight week.
What’s next
Saturday, Oct. 31. Moicano across the cage, 25 minutes on the clock if it goes the distance, and Nolan walking out with one full camp at a new address behind him.
Quick take: changing gyms right before a first main event usually smells like panic. This one doesn’t, because Nolan made his decision before the UFC made theirs, and he went somewhere that can throw a fresh UFC-level body at him every round of every sparring session. The risk is the obvious one. One camp is a small sample, and five rounds against a veteran is where small samples get tested. If the two-week trial instinct was right, it’ll show up somewhere around Round 4 on Saturday night.
