Curtis Millender looks back at his journey and realizes how fortunate he is. Yes, he worked for this. He pushed for this. Everything he did over the past seven years had been for this.
But still, the welterweight wouldn’t be where he is now — in the UFC, an actual contender — had a couple of decisions he made gone differently. He could have quit — multiple times — and he considered it more than once.
The man who fell for wrestling at age 4 because of a fascination with Shawn Michaels — he’s still a “big WWE nerd” who hosts a WrestleMania party for his friends every year, complete with a $5 an entry T-shirt contest he has yet to win.
Millender (17-3), 31, has traveled a circuitous path to the co-main event on Saturday against Elizeu Zaleski dos Santos at UFC Fight Night. He bounced between many local regional promotions in California and Bellator. He finally caught the UFC’s attention after six straight victories.
All the while, he barely scraped by. After almost every fight, he took his family to breakfast the next morning, then paid the bills which were piling up. By the time he reached the next fight, he was close to broke. The gyms he also worked at provided his only other income.
“It was just rough, when you would fight and you’d bring in the extra check, but there wasn’t really an extra check,” Millender said. “There’s still stuff that had been piling up through camp. Camp is eight weeks and you get $1,500 and you have to pay two months of everything.
“That builds up, it definitely makes you work for it. There’s been times, especially if I’m fighting local, where I’m selling a bunch of tickets. There are times where I spent all of my fight purse and the ticket money and if I don’t win the fight, I don’t get that win bonus and I don’t get anything. So I’m always betting on myself. I’m always going to bet the whole bank on myself. Every time.”
That’s how Millender meandered throughout his fighting life. After high school in California, he fought as an amateur and trained on the side as he worked as a door-to-door day-spa marketing salesman — a gig he found on Craigslist that ended up paying well. He liked being able to market the new spas and massage parlors to local businesses in the neighborhoods they were contracted to for Nu Image Marketing. He did well enough that he considered it a full-time career, potentially leaving fighting altogether.
“It was actually really lucrative,” Millender said. “At one point I had decided to just go all-in on it and go full time, and they had promoted me. I was getting ready to open up my own office in New Jersey and it kind of fell through, they said it would take another month or two.
“I said, ‘Forget it.’ I just started training and got a job in the gym.”
At 23, he wanted to fight, but money was tight. Fighting won.
Working at the front desk of Billy Burke’s gym when he wasn’t training, Millender focused on turning pro. He won his first seven fights in Fight Club OC, then went to Bellator, where he lost two of three matches — one of them to Brennan Ward.
While training for a fight on a regional card, he called Ben Jones who told him to come to his gym to train. Jones saw deficiencies in Millender’s style, specifically that he was too content to win by decision instead of trying to finish. In the lead-up to a fight against Eddie Mendez in October 2015, they worked together briefly. Millender lost a unanimous decision. He then transferred to Jones’ gym full time — getting a job working there while also training.
“He just had something, he had this athletic ability, had this fast-twitch,” Jones said. “I was tapping him and I could feel people get discouraged when it happens, especially if it’s happening a lot. But that wasn’t happening with him. I could see him getting frustrated, but I could see his mind working and I saw that he was recognizing something in himself in that moment and that’s rare.
“A lot of people, they don’t want to recognize maybe a deficiency or recognize that maybe they need some work at something.”
Millender knew there was something missing. Jones told him he wasn’t mean enough. He needed to change his fighting mentality.
It took a few fights, but after a TKO of Johnny Cisneros in Bellator 170, Jones saw it and Millender understood it. It was his third win in a row.
Despite the in-ring growth and knockout-reel highlights, he was still living fight-to-fight. Jones could see it.
What Millender didn’t tell anyone was that he was about to quit. He couldn’t afford to fight anymore. On Monday mornings, he would do all the meal prep at the gym, train and then deliver the meals to the fighters. Teammates and Jones would pick him up to take him to the gym.
Before his fight with Nick Barnes on Jan. 12, 2018, he made the decision that if it didn’t become financially feasible soon, he was walking away.
“It was just my own [pressure],” Millender said. “I already had the full support and hadn’t really told anybody that’s what I was going to do. It was kind of pressure on myself. Could I continue to put my family through it?”
Jones knew that, too, and told Millender to stick with him. That it would happen soon. Millender knocked Barnes out in the second round with a head kick and in the cage after the fight, Jones told him he made it — the way he had fought would get him to the UFC. Within a week, the UFC offered him a contract.
Jones says Millender still has growth potential, and they’ve won all nine fights the two have trained for together.
“What I see mostly now is just the way I feel like I just control every aspect of the fight,” Millender said. “I make them move when I want them to move. I can [get] them to throw the punches, the kicks that I want them to throw when I’m ready for them to throw it. I’m always seeing openings, always looking for the openings. Not even looking for the openings. I’m just creating openings.”
Just like he did in his career. Over and over again.