Former UFC champ Cody Garbrandt learning to cope with change

Former UFC bantamweight champion Cody Garbrandt has never been a fan of change.

The 28-year-old vividly recalls getting angry when he returned home from school as a child to find his mother had rearranged the furniture in the living room. “It made me physically ill,” he said.

Garbrandt, however, realized he needed to mix things up after losing three consecutive fights by knockout.

So he left his wife and infant son, along with the training camp he’s known since the start of his career in Sacramento, California, to get a fresh perspective by training part-time with Mark Henry and his famed crew of coaches in New Jersey.

Garbrandt believes he will reap the rewards of that decision when he returns to action for the first time since March 2019 when he faces Raphael Assuncao on Saturday as part of the UFC 250 card at the UFC Apex facility.

The bout will serve as the co-headliner of a pay-per-view card featuring a women’s featherweight title bout between Felicia Spencer and champion Amanda Nunes, with the main card airing at 7 p.m.

“I feel like I’ve battled my demons, corrected a lot of the errors and mistakes I needed to and got out of my comfort zone, away from my family and everything I’ve known,” Garbrandt said. “I think this is going to be a huge payoff come Saturday night.”

Garbrandt has proven to be a force in the division when he is at his best. He won the first 11 fights of his career, six of those in the UFC on his way to becoming a champion at 25 years old.

The reign was short-lived. After a spectacular performance in a unanimous-decision victory over Dominick Cruz to win the belt made him a superstar in December 2016, Garbrandt was knocked out by T.J. Dillashaw the following November. Another knockout loss to Dillashaw in the rematch was followed by a first-round knockout loss to Pedro Munhoz.

That sent Garbrandt back to the drawing board.

“Like I said, I hate change,” he said. “Because sometimes I think changes are made of anger. But some change is good. You can’t just keep going back with the same mindset and approach. That would be insane. So there was a real soul-search. It’s me versus me always and I had to be real with myself.”

Garbrandt not only had to deal with fixing what was wrong physically, but also mentally. He had spent his whole career visualizing winning a UFC title and was able to accomplish that, but he didn’t have a plan for what came next.

While he was trying to figure that out, he had to deal with a series of injuries that included a scary kidney infection in March.

He found inspiration to overcome it all in his 2-year-old son, Kai.

“My son looks up to me and watches every single thing I do,” Garbrandt said. “I’ll be shadow-boxing and look over and see Kai shadow-boxing around the house. Me and my wife trip out all the time because he listens to us and absorbs everything we do and say…. I know I have to be a good example for him. I want him to be proud to say, ‘That’s my father.’ … He can see I never gave up. I want to show him it doesn’t matter if life doesn’t go as planned, you have to keep going.”

Contact Adam Hill at ahill@reviewjournal.com. Follow @AdamHillLVRJ on Twitter.