Nick Newell, who fought Justin Gaethje with one hand 12 years ago, calls the new UFC champ 'a one-of-one human being'

At some point in time, an artist will come along who’ll depict the before and after shots of each of Justin Gaethje’s opponents, just to illustrate the trauma he introduces to mortal men. This year alone he left Paddy Pimblett in such a state of disrepair that both eyes were swollen shut days after their UFC 324 encounter to kick off the Paramount+ era.

Then this past Sunday, in unifying the UFC’s lightweight title at the White House, Gaethje broke two orbital bones on Ilia Topuria’s face, rendering Topuria unable to see (or continue after the fourth round) as blood wheezed out of his cheekbones. 

Fighting Gaethje is one the most hazardous, perhaps most sadistic things a fighter can do, even when in peak form.

Now imagine doing it with one hand.

Old-schoolers remember that Nick Newell, a Connecticut-based fighter who was born with a congenital amputation on his left arm, faced off with the game’s most relentless buzzsaw nearly a dozen years ago for the World Series of Fighting (WSOF) lightweight title. Even back then it felt like a bats*** crazy thing to do, stepping with the then-undefeated Gaethje without a full complement of limbs, given he was a lucid zombie.

Yet at a remove of a decade, now that Gaethje has broken one of the game’s pound-for-pound best in Topuria, it all feels positively phantasmagoric.

“The only way to stop him is to literally kill him,” Newell told Uncrowned this week. “The only way to change anything in his game is to completely knock him unconscious. There’s no other way to do it. 

“There’s only two people I’ve ever witnessed where nothing changes when they’re tired. You can see them tired, you can hear them breathing — like, I could hear [Gaethje] breathing in our fight. But nothing changes. His power doesn’t change. His output doesn’t change. Nothing changes. Him and Dricus du Plessis are the only two people I’ve ever seen that are like that.”

Newell was a marvel in his own right, having won the Michigan-based XFC lightweight title by beating a very tough veteran, Eric Reynolds. He signed to WSOF — the precursor to the PFL — and won back-to-back fights with first-round submissions of Keon Caldwell and Sabah Fadai, respectively, to earn his shot at Gaethje. 

The fight took place at the Ocean Center in Daytona Beach, Florida, and was broadcast live on NBC. Gaethje had just taken out Richard Patishnock to win the title earlier in 2014, and all but one of his fights to that point had ended in finishes. The lone man to survive long enough to hear the scorecards was a fellow named Marcus Edwards, who faced Gaethje early on the regional scene in Broomfield, Colorado. 

Yet Newell was the Hollywood story in the matchup, much the same as the one-handed pitcher Jim Abbott was back in the 1980s-90s when he pitched for the California Angels and New York Yankees, among other teams. In 1993, Abbott tossed a no-hitter against the Cleveland Indians while with the Yankees, which stands to this day as an astounding feat.

Newell was seen as the next Jim Abbott. The difference was Newell was fighting in a cage, against a man who was swinging right hands at his head rather than a Louisville Slugger at a ball.  

“I’m, like, a tough person,” Newell says. “He didn’t break me. But what happens is the way that he fights, he’s so consistent and he’s so much in your face doing things, and he’s not brawling — he’s actually being technical. He’s not just swinging like an idiot. People just see that and think that’s what he’s doing, but he’s not. He’s got a game plan. He’s got a method, and he knows how to work around his skill set, and he knows how to fight into his skill set, and it shocks your nervous system. 

“Most people’s nervous system can’t put up with what he’s doing and what he’s willing to take. So you have someone like Ilia Topuria, and look — I’m more of a jiu-jitsu guy, maybe to a fault as I shot too many takedowns, but my striking is good. I’ve knocked people out and I’ve hurt people, usually by mistake in the gym. I know shots that would knock people out and I hit him with a head kick, a knee and an uppercut that would’ve knocked out anyone else.”

Newell laughs remembering it, the way someone might recall how perilously close they came to toppling down the Hillary Step after scaling Everest.

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“I’m not lying,” Newell continues, “he told me this when we talked at the beach the next day. He said, ‘I didn’t know where I was when you hit me, but I just started fighting.’ And I was like, ‘This man, he’s just different.’ I wish that I could have that in me.”

Gaethje winning the undisputed UFC lightweight title at 37 years old, in one of the sport’s best weight classes, is its own historical marker. Yet to do it, fighting an unsustainable style that was never meant for longevity, against one of the best fighters in the world in his prime … well, it speaks to the otherness of Gaethje. 

Not just as a fighter, but as a human being, which Newell has learned to appreciate as Gaethje continues to defy odds. 

“He’s always been a class act,” he says. “He asked me before we got in there, ‘What do you think about our fight?’ And I said, ‘I think I’m going to knock you out.’ It didn’t happen, but I thought it. And he said, ‘Hey, man, it’s going to happen sooner or later. If it was you, man, I’d be honored. That’d be great.’ And I was like, ‘This guy’s crazy.’

“He was like, ‘If you were able to do it, man, I would be happy for you.’ That’s what he told me. You have a human being that wants to win. He wants to win with every fiber of his being, but he’s not afraid to lose. And how dangerous is that?”

In the end, Newell wasn’t surprised to see Gaethje do the same thing he’s been doing his whole career to Topuria, despite being a 6-to-1 underdog.

“I mean, you never seen me break or quit or anything like that, but sometimes if I get tired in a fight, I try to push through, but my body can’t respond the same way,” Newell says. “And his body can just keep going, and keep going. Even if he’s tired, even if he’s hurt, or he gets rocked.

“I think for someone like Ilia, who’s used to just hitting people and they go out or part of them breaks, he takes a little piece of them and they get scared to keep coming forward. And Ilia hit him with his best shots, and yet this guy wasn’t going down.  It’s hard for someone’s nervous system to deal with that. And it’s not even like people are afraid of [Gaethje]. It’s just he just operates on a different level than most human beings.”

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Perhaps there’s a silver lining to having lasted past the midway point of the second round against Gaethje, especially when trying to deal with his inexhaustible pressure with one arm. Ultimately Gaethje proved too much for Newell, winning via second-round TKO all those years ago, after a massive cut opened up over Newell’s right eye. 

Newell, who is 40 now and owns and runs the Fighting Arts Academy in Milford, made a memorable run in getting a chance to compete on the UFC’s Contender Series in 2020. He is the centerpiece of a 2021 biopic, “Notorious Nick,” which details him overcoming the odds in combat sports to make a name, even if there were a few liberties taken.

“It kind of made my relationship with my dad look worse than it was,” he says, “but if you just take it for being a movie, then it’s pretty good. They made Eric Reynolds look like a horrible person when he’s actually literally the opposite, which always made me feel bad, but they had to make a movie.” 

Newell last competed in 2021 in Bellator and hasn’t ruled out a swan song fight. Yet these days he’s content with coaching his fighters and running his gym, along with being a father. Newell just had his fourth kid three weeks ago, a daughter named Daphne Cadhla. 

One day, at some point in the future, when he’s talking about his own improbable run in mixed martial arts, perhaps his kids will wonder about his encounter with Justin Gaethje. 

“People ask me about fighting him all the time, ‘Were you scared?'” he says. “I was not scared of this man. And when he hit me, it wasn’t particularly hard. I wasn’t like, ‘Oh my God.’ I wasn’t scared of getting hit by him. That’s not what he’s good at. He doesn’t have any outstanding qualities in terms of technical skill that make him stand out. 

“But he does a few things really, really well. His footwork is actually better than people give him credit for. His thing is his heart and his determination and his pressure. He’s a one-of-one human being. And it doesn’t matter if he’s hurt. It doesn’t matter if he’s tired. Nothing matters.”