Brian Ortega didn’t look good on the scale on Friday in Shanghai. In fact, he looked as though he’d been through the inner layers of hell as he waddled up on unsteady legs for his weigh-in, with his hair a mess and a thousand-yard stare. Sometimes the visuals are stronger than words.
So bad that the UFC preempted things by changing his fight with Aljamain Sterling to a 153-pound catchweight before he weighed in.
When it was booked a couple of months back, it wasn’t a surprise that Ortega would face Sterling at the UFC’s latest Fight Night in China — it was that he would do it as a featherweight. Ortega had made it pretty clear that he “one thousand percent” had his eyes on a jump to lightweight, where there was a wide-open set of new possibilities.
If he was to make another title push, it would be better to try it in a division where he wasn’t stuck behind the eight-ball. But the move would also relieve him of a big weight cut, which at the age of 34 might’ve been the greatest lure of all.
So why did he opt to stay down at featherweight?
“Just the fact that there's movement in the featherweight division,” he told Uncrowned earlier this week. “The reasoning for going up to '55 was just there was no movement for me [at 145 pounds]. There was no possible fight until maybe a year, a year and a half. That’s how long they wanted me to wait. So '55 then became an option.
“Now that '45 is free again, and there’s a lot of movement here, I figured why not keep staying here? Maybe an opportunity presents itself at '55 and we can go for it, but as far as I can tell right now, it's been my weight class, so why not stay in it?”
Ortega has had a rough go of late. He has fought just six times in the past seven years, and he has gone 2-4 in those fights. Two of those losses — against Max Holloway in 2018, and against Alexander Volkanovski in 2021 — were in title fights. In his latest fight, which happened at the festive Sphere card in September 2024, he was dominated by Diego Lopes so bad that one judge handed in a 30-26 scorecard.
“Yeah, man, it was a lot,” Ortega said of the engulfing electronic optics at the Sphere. “It was a lot. Especially, I’m someone who kind of gets overstimulated with a lot going on when there's just a lot of movement. I tend to kind of just, I don't know — it’s never suited me well. I think it's from my upbringing, I don’t like a lot of movement around me.
“But I’m not trying to make excuses, bro. At the end of the day, I felt like I got caught way too early. Maybe I got too ambitious with the pressure, and I paid the price, man. I got cracked early and it was just playing catch-up the whole fight.”
Despite everything, nearly a full year later Ortega sits at No. 5 in the UFC’s featherweight rankings, which is an indication that he’s still without shouting distance of a title fight. A win against the former bantamweight champion Sterling would go a long way in making that happen.
Not that Vegas likes his chances. He was installed as a nearly 3-to-1 underdog by BetMGM against Sterling even before the hard weight cut, marking the first time he’s been pushed so far to the wrong side of the ledger. The odds are saying that not only will he leave China without a victory, but that the anticipated move to lightweight is coming a fight too late.
Ortega himself doesn’t see it that way.
In fact, earlier in the week he was as chill as they come, handling his media obligations with Zen-like aplomb as he soaked in the atmosphere of Shanghai. When asked if the idea of winning the title still burned in him, if it still drove him to the extremes to make it happen, he didn’t hesitate.
“I look at it like, bro, I don’t quit,” he said. “That's just my mentality. I don’t want to quit, because that feels like an easy way out. I feel like, for me, it would be easy to say, ‘Hey man, I gave you my best. I fought for the belt twice more than — I don't even think a lot of fighters will ever fight for the belt, let alone fight for it twice.’ It’s easy to make peace with that and just fight.”
He says that behind closed doors, training only strengthens his convictions.
“At this point I’m just fighting because one, I love to fight, but when I train in the gym and I see what I’m capable of in proper settings with partners that push me, it fuels me,” he says. “And these guys are — I mean, I’m going with some top-level guys and they're like, ‘Yo, bro, you're shocking and you're surprising us.’ So when I get things like that and data of that aspect, it fuels me.
“It's like, 'Bro, no, you're not washed. Look at you. You're beating these young kids who are at the best of and just the best of the best, and you're hanging with them or you're beating them.' So, it lets me know like, 'Hey, there's a lot of fight in you, bro.' It's good motivation.”
It’ll be the rare five-round co-main event. The reasons for the UFC making it a five-rounder are open to debate, but in a lot of people’s eyes it’s because — even with Johnny Walker and Zhang Mingyang sitting in the headlining spot — this feels like the real main event. The North American audience has a greater interest in Ortega’s fight with Sterling, as it pairs a former champ with a perennial contender.
Five rounds is a lot for a fighter who traveled 6,500 miles to first battle the scale, and then face off with a crafty veteran like Sterling. When people talk about adversity — fighters who have their backs against the wall — they are talking about Brian Ortega.
He has his back against the wall, yet he still thinks it’s in him to reach the top.
“Yeah, I mean, who doesn't want to fight for gold, man? I didn’t join the sport to just fight regular fights," he said. "Not that I’m downing anyone like that because it’s a beautiful job. At the end of the day, man, it is a beautiful job just to fight. But I'm very goal-oriented and I’m competitive, so the fact that I've always been one or two fights away from the title for the last 10 years has been...”
Here he shakes his head.
“It’s pretty dope, man. Pretty dope. It lets me know, bro — your ass is just right there the whole time.”
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