Tommy McMillen says he entered his UFC run carrying a problem that had followed him for two years: a pinched sciatic nerve in his back that could numb his foot in the middle of training. The unbeaten fighter said the injury finally cleared only five or six weeks before his April debut, and he is now talking about that stretch as he prepares to face Alberto Montes in Oklahoma City.
That matters because McMillen has built a perfect start through 10 professional fights while most of his wins came by first-round stoppage. He said the nerve issue was so disruptive that running, jumping and even five-minute mitt rounds could make his foot go numb, forcing him to stop and get the blood flowing before continuing. He said he was still winning anyway, and still climbing toward the UFC.
McMillen earned his roster spot by beating David Mgoyan on Dana White’s Contender Series last fall in Las Vegas, then debuted in April against Manolo Zecchini. In that fight, McMillen and Zecchini went back and forth in a striking battle for nearly three-and-a-half minutes before McMillen hurt him and finished along the fence.
The part that gives the story its edge is how little normal preparation he had while those wins piled up. McMillen said he did not get to grapple at all for the Mgoyan camp, and that he was shutting down a high-level grappler without grappling in camp or for a prior year before that. He said he took regional fights at 160 pounds and 170 pounds just to keep getting wins and keep moving forward, even while he was barely training for a lot of those bouts.
McMillen said the problem never felt minor. He described modified fight camps, numbness during warmups and a constant reset every time his foot went dead. He said he worked with doctors to figure out movements that helped, and once the injury cleared before his debut, it stayed gone. That makes his current run harder to read as a simple hot streak. It looks more like a fighter arriving in the UFC after spending years winning while fighting through something that could have stopped the climb altogether.
McMillen now says he has been doing mixed martial arts since he was three years old, and that experience is part of why he believes he can handle what comes next. The immediate test is Montes in Oklahoma City, but the larger question is how much better McMillen can look now that the injury that shadowed most of his rise is no longer in the way.
