Self-Made Team’s Plan to Take Down MMA’s Greatest Bloodline With ‘No References’

NEW YORK — Ben Vickers has to be, by his own admission, one of the least qualified coaches to be involved in a UFC title fight at Madison Square Garden.

Vickers is the head coach at Scrappy MMA in Perth, Australia, home of UFC welterweight champion Jack Della Maddalena (18-2), who will make his first defense at UFC 322 on Saturday (10 p.m. ET on ESPN PPV, prelims at 6 p.m. ET on ESPN+). Across the cage from Della Maddalena will be former lightweight champion Islam Makhachev (27-1) – and the championship lineage he represents.

Makhachev is ESPN’s second pound-for-pound fighter in the world. His coaches are Khabib Nurmagomedov – the only UFC champion to retire undefeated – and American Kickboxing Academy founder Javier Mendez, who has trained more than a half-dozen MMA champions since the 1990s, including Nurmagomedov and fellow UFC Hall of Famer Daniel Cormier. According to the online database Tapology, Della Maddalena’s head coach has a professional MMA fighting record of 0-2.

“I have no identifying information, none,” Vickers told ESPN. “I don’t have a fighting career to fall back on. I’m not a lifelong martial artist. I believe I deserve to be here, but I don’t know how I got here.”

Vickers is modest, but nonetheless, his coaching experience at the highest level is limited to Della Maddalena’s UFC career, which began in 2022. Scrappy MMA’s other coaches include Della Maddalena’s longtime teammate Ryan Gray and Della Maddalena’s older brother Josh, who are essentially her fighting peers, with fewer than 20 appearances combined between them. They are a local team with little to no martial arts experience, whose members borrow techniques from seminars and tinker with their own.

While Makhachev’s corner and his legacy of more than 30 years of MMA experience make for a group worthy of one of the world’s most iconic venues for combat sports, Della Maddalena’s team could probably walk through the packed seats of Madison Square Garden on fight night and barely be noticed.

“And we prefer that,” Vickers said. “We don’t give a damn if anyone knows our name.”

The lack of a championship record set by Scrappy MMA has yet to hold Della Maddalena back. The 29-year-old is 8-0 since joining the UFC in January 2022 and hasn’t dropped a fight since May 2016, but the gap in reputation between the corners in Saturday’s main event creates an interesting dichotomy ahead of UFC 322. has This small Perth team has risen to the top of the sport with so few credentials, and will that ultimately prove a disadvantage against Makhachev and the powerful Dagestani team?

“It was never intimidating,” Gray told ESPN. “At the end of the day, their guy has to step up and fight our guy – and we’re pretty sure our guy is going to fuck their guy.”

Naturally, the No. 1 reason for Scrappy MMA’s confidence — Saturday and beyond — may be Della Maddalena.

Vickers vividly remembers the day the Della Maddalena brothers first walked into his gym in 2012. It was a Saturday morning, which was one of his least favorite days of the week. The gym, which was operating under a different name at the time (and under a different head coach), offered free sessions on Saturdays to attract new clients. This arrangement has not always attracted the most talented or committed group.

“When something is free, a lot of idiots show up,” said Vickers, who purchased the gym in 2019. “This morning, I’m here at 9 a.m., at Josh and Jack’s Della Maddalena house — and immediately I say, ‘This is going to be a good morning.’”

Vickers has been waiting for a talent like Jack Della Maddalena since he retired from fighting in 2007 at the age of 28. Vickers’ career as a fighter started late and ended early. He did not train in martial arts as a child in London. He joined the British Army at 16 and learned a little boxing, but felt, to his surprise, that the British Army “don’t teach you how to fight.” He left the military at age 21, but didn’t begin proper martial arts training until his mid-20s. He quickly realized he would never become a world champion, but he believed he could coach one.

“I felt like I really understood what I was being told, I just couldn’t execute it myself,” Vickers said. “I had a problem with the execution part, but I really understood the technical part. I’ve always been very interested in violence, and my thing is ‘beautiful violence’. Jack is the biggest proponent of what I would call ‘beautiful violence’. He’s a man who will decapitate you cleanly but will do it looking like a boxer and not a thug.”

Looking back on his coaching philosophies, which began to take shape in earnest around 2011, when he moved from London to Perth, Vickers can’t pinpoint where they originated. But its trademark – that “beautiful violence” – probably has something to do with how the team has gained traction in MMA in a relatively short period of time. It’s a simple approach. Scrappy MMA exists for inflict damage. In Vickers’ words, a decision victory is akin to a draw. That doesn’t mean he expects his fighters to finish every fight, but they should try to do so at all times.

“He’s perfect for our team because he knows us inside out, and his approach to training is to go out there and get hurt,” Della Maddalena said of Vickers. “He’s not too controlling; he lets us be ourselves. His philosophy is to be vicious.”

Vickers’ approach – and the team’s execution of it – has taken the MMA scene in Perth to a level difficult to imagine when he first moved there. In 2012, an aspiring fighter like Gray couldn’t find an MMA gym within an hour of public transportation. The majority of MMA gyms he found were not MMA gyms. The best one could hope for was a kickboxing gym that offered a white belt jiu-jitsu class or a jiu-jitsu facility that allowed striking.

Booking an MMA fight in the area was almost impossible, and the fights that did happen were potentially comical in the way they played out.

“The first fighter I showed in Perth, we did an MMA fight at a Thai boxing show,” Vickers said. “My guy dropped the other guy in the first round, and the ref separated them. I jumped in, thinking it was over, and the commission told me to get out while the ref gave him an 8 count – in an MMA fight. It eventually continued and my guy lost by submission in the second round. That’s where the sport was when I got there.”

It’s remarkable to think that 13 years later, Perth has the reigning welterweight champion in the main event of one of the UFC’s most talent-rich cards of the year.

Stylistically, the main event match will depend heavily on Della Maddalena’s ability to respond to Makhachev’s wrestling pressure. The Dagestani style is known for neutralizing and wearing down opponents on the ground. Della Maddalena’s team doesn’t want him to turn the fight into a grappling match, but the coaches are confident he can win it anywhere.

Based on the resumes, it doesn’t look like Scrappy MMA should be there – especially compared to his opponent. But Vickers believes he and his team deserve to be here because, as he said, they worked “hard.” A fight team doesn’t get to the point of defending against Makhachev and Dagestani MMA without hard work, and Scrappy MMA has put in a lot of it over the past 13 years.

The great thing about MMA is that at the end of the day, resumes don’t matter. Legacies don’t win fights. Black belts and trophies hidden in gyms count for nothing once a fight begins. There will be a fight on Saturday, and Scrappy MMA thinks his guy will win.

“I believe 100 percent in what we are doing and I believe Jack is a generational talent,” Vickers said. “We’re here because we work two hours every morning and two hours every night. We’re not here to be famous. Jack will beat Islam on Saturday, and we’ll go home and go back to living under a rock until it’s time to take out the next one.”