Had it not been for martial arts, Australian Cody Haddon might well have been lost to the streets. But having stayed on the straight and narrow for the best part of two decades, the 25-year-old bantamweight is now a bona-fide UFC fighter -- and someone whose star could soon rise alongside those of his West Australian colleagues.
Haddon on Tuesday night [Wednesday AEST] secured himself a UFC contract with a stunning submission victory over Billy Brand as part of Dana White's Contender Series. The 25-year-old first dropping his American opponent to the ground with a dynamic combination before moving in to complete the rear naked choke on the canvas.
With a large group of friends and family watching on back in Perth, Haddon capitalized on his virtual make-or-break opportunity having previously caught the attention of UFC matchmaker Sean Shelby. But Haddon said he never had any doubt the UFC was where he belonged, that the promotion had forever been his destiny.
"It's weird, I've been doing this stuff for so long and I remember before even getting a call I was thinking 'you just need to be given an opportunity', and I always felt that I deserved to be there with the best guys in the world," Haddon told ESPN.
"When you've trained for 20 years, I turn 26 shortly, when you've trained for that long, of course you're going to be an absolute expert in your field. So I just felt that when I was fighting on the regional scene it was frustrating because I knew that I deserved to be fighting the best guys in the world, and I'm just super grateful that Sean Shelby actually gave me the opportunity.
"When I won, when I was sitting there just waiting for Dana and the press, it just felt normal to me, I was like 'yes, this is what I was born for, this is my destiny, finally I'm where I need to be'."
Haddon will now follow in the footsteps of welterweight star Jack Della Maddalena and Steve Erceg , who was one half of the co-main event at UFC 305 last weekend and had also fought for the flyweight world title back in May.
It appears, then, that Western Australia is having an MMA moment, not just inside the Octagon but also in the sell-out RAC Arenas that have welcomed the UFC to Perth since the ban on cage fighting was lifted in 2017.
Haddon says the MMA talent flowing out of the state can perhaps be attributed to a lack of other activities available to the state's youth -- and is adamant it kept him from treading the wrong path.
"There's not much to do in W.A., what are you going to do?" Haddon said with a chuckle. "You may as well be applying yourself somewhere, right? And I honestly think that's the explanation for it.
"MMA kept me off the streets, without martial arts who knows where I'd be? I feel like with a lot of temptations around, martial arts keep you straight. If there's not much to do, sometimes you look for fun elsewhere and make wrong decisions in life, so I feel like martial arts is saving lives, it's really transforming lives. And I feel like that is really the explanation for it.
"I love W.A. but "wait awhile" they say is what it stands for, we are sometimes late to the party, but I feel like we're taking over the party now, we're running it."
With Western Australia locked down from the rest of the country - and the world - for most of 2020 and 2021, Haddon struggled to find opponents. It did however mean he stepped into the cage with Erceg for a fight he lost via unanimous decision, but one that now only fuels his confidence given his fellow West Australian's rise in the UFC flyweight division.
"It was my third fight and I fought him because I couldn't get a fight, it was hard to get a fight [at that time]," Haddon told ESPN. "It was a short notice fight and I actually did really well, it was a close and competitive fight. And then to see what he's done in the UFC, he's absolutely killing it, one of the best fighters in the world, and that just gives me so much confidence.
"And me and Steve train together all the time, I consider him as a friend and we're always going to be helping each other out, and I know if he can do it then I can definitely get to that level too.
"So it does give me a lot of confidence, especially coming in to this [Contender] fight, I knew that I belonged here, not just because I know what I'm capable of but because I had been in there with [Erceg] and he's done so well. That was very reassuring for me.
"And Perth, like I said before, Western Australia, in the next few weeks we've got my training partner, Quillan Salkilld , in the Contender Series, and that will be four people from Perth in the UFC at the same time... I imagine we'd be producing some of the best talent in Australia in the UFC right now. The next few years are going to be very very exciting."
Armed with the "see-saw" combination that helped secure the win over Brand, and a fighting approach that he says involves really no game plan at all, Haddon will soon shift his attention to a UFC fight proper before the end of the year.
The next step on a 20-year road to his destiny awaits, and it can't come soon enough.
"November, mid-November, I told them I'd be ready to go again; definitely I want to get a fight in before the end of the year, that's a non-negotiable," he said.
"Whether they come through and can actually put me on a card, that's up to them. But November would be great... that would give me a good hard eight weeks of a training camp.
"I came out of this fight with no injuries, so that would be a perfect time to get back into a camp. As for an opponent, I haven't really thought about it, whoever they give me, I'm not really bothered. It's always the same, the opponent doesn't matter, so whatever."
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