Ian Machado Garry is on top of the world as he prepares for his welterweight title fight against Islam Makhachev at UFC 330 on August 15th. All the hard work he’s put into his career will culminate in this bout against the consensus pound-for-pound No. 1 fighter in the world. Many don’t believe he has a chance, but he’s used to the doubters. He uses the doubters as fuel, and one of the very first doubters he ever had was his mother.
In a recent appearance on the High Performance podcast, Garry described
how his mixed martial arts career began: with him dropping out of college to wash windows for his uncle. He’d never trained MMA before, but decided he’d join a gym and dedicate himself fully to fighting. His mother was not happy with him, to say the least.
“She wrote me, word for word in quotation marks, ‘Being the next Conor McGregor is not a f–king plan,'” Garry recalled. “I made my UFC debut at [Madison Square Garden]. I made my UFC debut at MSG when I was 23, and that letter got blasted everywhere. She couldn’t fly [to the fight] because it was COVID, and I was so happy because of it.”
“Because I was like, ‘You know what? You f–king guys didn’t show up when you needed to and give me the love and the support. So you shouldn’t be there for the ‘Oh, that’s my boy.’ No, you can be ‘That’s my boy’ behind the scenes when it matters.”
“You can be scared for me and support me,” he continued. “I don’t hold this over my parents, but it irritates me and pushes me to be the best, if that makes sense … To any parent in the world, if you take this approach towards your kids, it will give you a better relationship with your kids. I know I have to do it with mine because of the relationship I’ve been given with my parents: I will be behind you 110%.”
“I’m not saying what she did was wrong,” Garry concluded. “But I take that, and I use that as fuel every day.”
Garry now has all the support he needs from his wife Layla, who has become one of the most visible WAGs in UFC history and the source of much vitriol.
“She is my earth angel,” Ian gushed. “She is the person who, when I need guidance, I go to her. And I feel like any smart man in the world should look at his wife and know that’s the person I need to listen to. Like, if the world was run by women, we’d all live in a better world. It would all be simpler and easier. That’s the fact of the matter whether you wanna agree with it or not or you think whatever it is.”
“If women rule the world and we just listen to them and let them take over, it would be an easier way.”
Garry says that, but what if the world was run by his mother and not his wife?
