Tommy McMillen said he reached the UFC roster while working through a two-year pinched sciatic nerve injury that left his foot going numb in training. The perfect 10-fight run matters because it was built while he says basic preparation was limited, and his next fight with Alberto Montes in Oklahoma City now sits on top of a much harder road than the record alone suggests.
Tommy McMillen and the nerve
"People don’t understand how bad of an injury I was dealing with." McMillen said that ahead of his fight with Alberto Montes in Oklahoma City, describing a back problem that reached into nearly every part of camp. "It was a two-year injury — a pinched sciatic nerve in my back, so any time I would do any kind of running, jumping, training, my foot would go numb…"
He said the problem did not stay in the background. "Even hitting mitts — moving around, hitting mitts — every time I would do a five-minute round with somebody, my foot would go numb and we’d have to wake it back up, get the blood flowing…" McMillen called it "a headache," and said modified camps became the norm because "I couldn’t do much at all."
Dana White’s Contender Series run
McMillen built that record anyway. He won his first 10 professional fights, took eight of those wins between 2023 and 2025, and finished all but one by first-round stoppage. Last fall in Las Vegas, he beat David Mgoyan on Dana White’s Contender Series to earn his UFC roster spot.
That win carried extra weight because McMillen said he did not get to grapple at all for the Mgoyan camp. "I didn’t get to grapple at all for that camp and I shut down a high-level grappler — people don’t put enough respect on that kid’s name; he’d beat a lot of guys in the UFC — and I was able to shut down his wrestling without wrestling or grappling in camp, or for a prior year before that."
April in the UFC
In April, McMillen debuted against Manolo Zecchini and stopped him after nearly three-and-a-half minutes. He said the nerve issue did not go away until five weeks or six weeks before that fight, then stayed away. That sequence is the part to watch now: the first UFC appearance came only after the injury had finally eased, which gives his next outing against Alberto Montes a cleaner read on what his ceiling looks like when he can train normally.
McMillen said he has been doing mixed martial arts since he was three years old, and that long base showed when he could change tactics inside the Zecchini fight. For a fighter who says he was barely training through much of the run to the UFC, the real test is no longer whether he can survive camp. It is whether a healthy camp turns a 10-0 record into something even harder to solve.
