Bo Nickal is set to shine at Madison Square Garden this Saturday, and he expects the lights to only get brighter with another win.
The undefeated middleweight prospect takes on Paul Craig on the UFC 309 main card. It is just the seventh pro bout for Nickal, who has been marked as a future champion since making the jump from three-time NCAA wrestling champion to MMA fighter.
Nickal, 28, isn’t the only red hot name rising up the 185-pound ranks. Fellow unbeaten competitor Khamzat Chimaev recently scored a dominant win over former UFC champion Robert Whittaker, and Nickal thinks even more highly of Chimaev after that performance.
“I think it was super impressive,” Nickal said on The Ariel Helwani Show. “To be honest, it’s funny because a lot of people expected that to be a tough fight for him and—you can ask around all the people that I talked to—I kind of thought he would do that to Whittaker. It’s one thing to think that or to kind of see that happening, but he actually did, which is super impressive. Whittaker’s not an easy fight for anybody and he made it look easy. So I was really impressed with his last performance and it seemed like he kind of took a different mentality into the fight as well, which was cool to see.
“That’s a fight I’m looking forward to. I think obviously he’s quite a bit ahead of me right now, but he’ll be fighting for the belt soon and then I’ll catch up quick.”
Chimaev is yet to be booked for a title fight, with champion Dricus du Plessis potentially meeting Sean Strickland in a rematch for his next title defense. However, Chimaev’s career-best win over Whittaker has inserted him firmly into the conversation.
That puts him a few steps ahead of Nickal, who is just 3-0 in the UFC so far. His fight with Craig is third-to-last on Saturday’s card, giving Nickal his highest card placement yet after opening the last three pay-per-views he was featured on.
He expects a win over Craig to propel him to an even higher ranked opponent and, soon, title talk.
“I feel like the rocket’s been strapped to me for a while,” Nickal said. “But if you look at anybody else’s career, they’re fighting over a decade before they’re in that position and I think I’ll be in there probably around-I mean, I’m basically there.
“I win one or two more fights and I’m fighting a ranked guy and then I’m fighting a top 5 and then I’m fighting for the belt. If I have six fights right now, I’m already past the halfway point if that’s the trajectory.”
Still relatively new to the scene, how far does Nickal think he can go with a big performance at “The World’s Most Famous Arena?”
“I’ve kind of reframed my mindset towards this because coming into MMA I had these goals of I want to be UFC world champion, I want to be the pound-for-pound No. 1 fighter in the world,” Nickal said. “Lately, I’ve reframed that to just I want to continue to just get better and improve and see where I can go and not really put a limit on it.
“Because even though, to most people, UFC champion, pound-for-pound No. 1 fighter in the world seems like an unattainable goal, it’s still putting a cap on it. So my focus has been now just improvement, and I think that I’m just going to continue to do that until my career is over, and even past that, I’m going to continue being a martial artist and learning and getting better at every single thing.”
