How a fighter, with just hours’ notice, ended up in the co-main event of UFC 303

Dan Ige was as mentally removed from a fight as one could be on a Saturday afternoon.

He had just spent the last hour on a massage table at his home in Las Vegas. Deep tissue massage, quiet spa music playing in the background. Ige was in a state of perfect relaxation and harmony.

“I’m completely zen,” Ige explained. “I’m lying on my back, asleep. My phone is on ‘do not disturb.’”

Three hours later, Ige found himself at T-Mobile Arena, where he showed up for the shortest fight in modern UFC history. Ige faced Diego Lopes in the co-main event of UFC 303, after Lopes’ original opponent, Brian Ortega, withdrew nearly an hour into the pay-per-view event.

The two featherweights met at 165 pounds, 20 pounds over the featherweight limit, due to the unusual circumstances of the fight. Ige lost by unanimous decision, but the result hardly mattered. The fight world universally revered Ige for making the fight one off the couch. Or in this case, the massage table.

UFC chief business officer Hunter Campbell received a message from Ortega’s team at 3:41 p.m. PT on Saturday that he was out of the game. The UFC prelims had already begun. The entire card had already been restructured over the previous two weeks, due to Conor McGregor’s withdrawal from his main event fight against Michael Chandler due to a broken toe. And now, with less than four hours to go until the main card, it had lost its co-main event.

Five minutes after receiving the news about Ortega, Campbell was on the phone with Ali Abdelaziz, Ige’s manager. And a minute later, Campbell and Abdelaziz were frantically trying to reach Ige, who was blissfully sleeping through his weekend massage.

“Ali started calling me, so I knew something big was going on,” Dan’s wife Savannah Ige told ESPN. “It’s funny to think about it now. I opened the door to tell him and he was so peaceful on that table. I didn’t know what Ali wanted, but I was starting to get SOS alerts on my phone.”

Ige called Abdelaziz, who informed him that Ortega had pulled out of UFC 303. At first, he didn’t understand why this news was so urgent to him. The UFC wanted Ige to fight Lopes, Abdelaziz said. Okay, Ige replied. The UFC knows he never says no to a fight. When did they want to book him?

“And Ali said, ‘Tonight,’” Ige said. “I was like, ‘What?’”

Ige’s first thought was probably the same as everyone else’s when they heard the news of the last-minute change: Is this even possible? UFC events are sanctioned and officiated by the Nevada State Athletic Commission. Normally, you can’t put a fight together in a matter of hours. Fighters must submit medical exams and weigh-ins the day before.

But Campbell knew of a rarely used regulation in the state of Nevada that allows the commission chairman to modify or waive certain requirements at his discretion, depending on the scenario. Campbell discovered the regulation in 2017 when a fighter was hospitalized after missing weight, and he nearly used it during the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020.

In this case, Ige was training for a July 20 fight at the Apex, his medicals were from a February fight in Nevada, and he and Lopes were the same weight. NSAC President Dallas Haun gave the green light.

Ige was paid more than his usual purse for agreeing to show up at the last minute. So the fight was real. Ige called his trainer, Eric Nicksick, and told him he was suddenly fighting in a UFC co-main event. Nicksick was scheduled to be at UFC 303 in the corner of light heavyweight fighter Roman Dolidze. He asked Ige if there was anything he needed him to do.

“I told him, ‘Just take my cup, please,’” Ige said. “‘I don’t have my cup.’ So he went to the gym to get it.”

As the preliminaries wore on, Ige made the 20-minute trek to the T-Mobile Arena loading dock and was quickly ushered inside. He passed through a VIP room, where he gave Campbell a quick hug and was momentarily dazzled by actor Mark Wahlberg. He stepped on a scale in the back and weighed in at 164.5 pounds. Lopes did the same, weighing in at 161.

Meanwhile, Nicksick called former UFC middleweight champion Sean Strickland to join Ige’s camp. Strickland was riding his motorcycle through the Vegas desert. He drove straight to the arena and parked his bike outside. Known as one of the most fearless fighters in the sport, Strickland was the most nervous of them all.

“He kept saying, ‘Man, you can just take this guy down, he’ll stay on his back, you can wrestle the whole time,’” Ige said. “I said, ‘Yeah, you can do it.’ But I didn’t want to do that. That’s not what I signed up for.”

Back at the Ige’s, Savannah’s older brother arrived to watch the fighting, as they had planned. Moments after entering, he asked, “Where’s Dan?”

“He had no idea what was going on,” Savannah said. “I told him and he was like, ‘What?! They can really do that?’”

After making weight for the 165-pound bout, Ige was led into the locker room where he set about calming his nerves. He had gone from zen to co-main event faster than anyone ever had. He didn’t even touch the “do not disturb” feature on his phone this time. He turned it off completely.

“People were messaging me and saying, ‘What the hell is going on? Is this true?’” Ige said. “I turned my phone off and took a deep breath. And yeah, we had a fight two hours later.”

The fight was entertaining. Lopes nearly submitted Ige early and won the first and second rounds. Ige rallied in the third round, however, and Lopes desperately tried to take him down in the end.

“All my respect to Dan Ige,” Lopes said in the Octagon after his win. “Not many guys take a fight on three hours’ notice.”

This whole situation has earned Ige more love and exposure than any other experience during his 17-fight UFC career.

“I was so happy with my performance and what I did,” Ige said. “And just the ovation from the crowd and Dana White (UFC president) … I’ve never had more respect from Dana. I always felt like he was kind of turning a deaf ear to me. But he was super respectful after that fight and Hunter called me and said, ‘I love you, man.’”

Behind all this is a story that goes back to 2017, when Ige had less than 10 fights under his belt. He fought on Dana White’s Contender Series and won, but was never offered a UFC contract. Campbell, however, specifically told Ige to keep at it and that he would eventually sign him.

Four months later, Ige was in New York for the UFC holding its annual card at Madison Square Garden. Ige was working as an assistant for Abdelaziz and helping one of their clients, Cody Garbrandt, who was defending his UFC title at the card.

On Friday night, Abdelaziz invited Ige to a nightclub in New York. Campbell was there and Abdelaziz thought it would be a good thing for them to interact. Ige initially declined, but Abdelaziz wouldn’t take no for an answer. Ige eventually took a cab to the club and met with Campbell and other UFC executives. He had a contract with the UFC by the end of the night.

“I was there to be a team player, but after a few drinks, I was happy and Hunter said, ‘Bro, I want to tell you that you’re a badass,’” Ige said. “He signed me right then. He said, ‘Welcome to the UFC.’”

Campbell remembers that night well. He deals with every fighter in the UFC. And he puts out a lot of fires. When McGregor pulled out of UFC 303, Campbell was the main person responsible for getting things back on track. When a global pandemic hit, Campbell was at the epicenter of keeping things going. He and White are connected and in communication 24 hours a day.

Fighters like Ige make Campbell’s life a little easier, especially when chaos strikes — which it often does in MMA. There’s a reason he thought of Ige, less than five minutes after losing to Ortega.

“Everything that kid told me in that nightclub came true,” Campbell said. “He told me, ‘I’m that guy. I don’t care who I fight. I’m either the guy I say I am or I’m not. I want to compete with everybody on the planet. I don’t believe there’s anybody better than me. Truth be told, I might lose a few fights or somebody might be better than me on any given night, but I’m never going to give up,’ and I believed him to the end.”