Mixed martial arts is an unforgiving sport, and its fans can be even more cruel than the strikes and grappling that take place in the cage. Bo Nickal knows that well, and if he forgot, he received a nasty-spirited reminder on Saturday and Sunday following his first professional loss as a mixed martial artist.
Nickal, the celebrated amateur wrestling product who burst onto the UFC scene, suffered a second-round TKO loss at the hands of Reinier de Ridder during the main card at UFC Des Moines on Saturday.
A series of well-placed knees to the midsection did Nickal in.
No sooner than the official result of the fight was read, the legion of Nickal haters took to social media to pelt the 29-year-old with insults, jeers, and next-level criticism.
Nickal was a guest on the Ariel Helwani Show on Tuesday, and he addressed the criticism—most specifically, he spoke to the concept of being “fraud checked,” as many insisted he was after the loss to de Ridder.
For those who are unaware, the term “fraud checked” applies to a fighter who has been built as a top contender, but who has run into a veteran who proves they’re not what they’ve been made out to be by the media or the UFC matchmakers.
“Yeah, everything’s so dramatized, and people in today’s day and age, there’s never a middle ground.,” Nickal told Helwani. “It’s either you’re amazing or you’re the worst, and so I think that really that’s just what it is. People want the drama, and they want the emotion to be evoked, and so for me, it’s really irrelevant. I’m on the path that I’m on, and I believe that the one loss doesn’t define me. Even if I lose again, I could lose two, three, four, five times, but I’m not going to quit, and I’m just going to keep getting better and keep improving. I think that there’s always going to be opinions of me, and some of them are going to be high, you know, too high. Some of them are going to be too low, and very few of them are going to be actually accurate, and so that doesn’t really affect me. I just want to keep getting better at fighting.”
Here is a look at the segment:
Nickal is now 7-1 as a pro, and he’d still qualify as a fighter on the cusp of a ranking at middleweight, or you could make the argument he already is one of the Top 15 185-pounders in the promotion.
RDR, though ranked No. 13, would likely be a problem for most of the fighters in the weight class. Quite honestly, I’d favor RDR to defeat at least four of the men currently ranked ahead of him on the latest UFC rankings.
That said, Nickal’s ranking isn’t going to rise after a loss. He needs a win—maybe two or three of them—to crack the Top 15. The big question for Nickal is what’s next?
I think the smartest fight for him would come against a middleweight who is also just outside the Top 15. If he wins that fight, perhaps he gets a shot at someone like Brendan Allen or Marvin Vettori.
Those are winnable fights for him, and it could be a path toward proving he wasn’t fraud checked. Perhaps the loss was instead proof the goods still need to be matured a bit before they can be certified as authentic.