Kyler Phillips Has No Regrets

“There are so many different paths I had to go through and mistakes I made along the way, and I had to make those mistakes to understand what it is. Now him and my younger brothers coming up, you still have to learn those lessons, but you can evolve faster, and you can avoid the mistakes that the people that paved that path for you made. He has the heart and mind for it, but he's excelling so fast because he can leap those things, those little challenges and all those things that I had to go through, and what took me maybe years to learn can take him months.”

The excitement in Phillips’ voice when talking about his brothers’ development in martial arts is evident, and it’s almost as if he wants to discuss them more than his own fight against Raoni Barcelos this weekend. But that’s just what comes with the territory when this isn’t about the next fight in the Octagon, but the next fight in life. Phillips really does live and breathe this, and he always has, even during the years when everyone else his age was doing anything but living like an athlete.

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“It's not that I never got along with kids my age, and I was never an outcast or nothing, but my friends were always people that were, even when I was in high school, 30-something years old and owning the jiu jitsu gym, owning Icon Sports Performance. And these guys I would hang around with would sponsor me for tournaments, I would get lunch with them, dinner with them, go compete every weekend and I was just hanging around those type of people who were a lot older. And I've had a couple friends around my age, but I was just always training throughout high school.”

Now at 28, that training has paid off, with the Ultimate Fighter and Dana White’s Contender Series veteran five fights into a UFC career where he’s gone 4-1, with the only loss a majority decision to Raulian Paiva in 2021. And despite the ups and downs, including a recent six-month suspension from the Nevada State Athletic Commission for a failed drug test, he wouldn’t change a thing.

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“No regrets at all,” Phillips said. “You see in any type of situation where people go through hardships and stuff like that is that they always use it as fuel for their fire if they want to grow. Say somebody was an alcoholic or was abused or bullied and then they got into martial arts or then they focus on this, that is the requirement for them to accept who they are and what they've gone through and to use that as a fuel to become who they are. And yeah, I think that I'm very blessed to be put in the situations I've been in.”

Phillips even took positives away from his recent absence from the Octagon, and as he gets ready to compete for the first time since his February 2022 submission of Marcelo Rojo, he’s got big plans at 135 pounds.

 

“It's good to take a step back and look at things from an honest perspective,” he said. “But even if I was even taken out of this, I would still be training. Like I said, it's a lifestyle to me. So the arts are never going to be away from me; it's a part of me. But this whole thing just helped me know that I'm going to be a multiple-time UFC world champion. I’m going to show all the hard work I've been putting in, and whether I got a fight coming up or I don't have a fight coming up, I'm always working on my craft. I'm always trying to grow in one way or another. And that's just me living life. That's what living life is to me.”