“In all honesty, on the contrary to what people might think professional cage fighters are like, most of them I know from my experience, and I know quite a lot, they’re not confrontational people at all,” says Tom Aspinall, born and raised in Atherton, who at the time of writing is the interim heavyweight mixed martial arts champion of the world.
“[Their] egos are just in check. We get beat up a lot. I have no need or desire to fight with anyone outside.”
This is immensely reassuring.
A friend of the Fury fighting dynasty, at 31 he says he’s ‘nearer to the end than the beginning’, in terms of his MMA career. But right now, he’s most certainly having his moment.
It’s well earned. There has never been a time that Tom Aspinall hasn’t been training, and if there was, he can’t recall it. He knows it was maybe before he was eight-years-old. His dad Andy would teach him Brazilian jiu-jistu moves in the garden at home.
When he beat hulking Russian fighter Sergei Pavlovich last November to take the world title, only the third fighter from the UK ever to do so, Tom Aspinall dedicated the belt to his dad, who diverted his own career to focus on his son’s, taking a redundancy payout and using it to open his first gym (he now has four around the North West).
“He [Pavlovich] is a big scary guy,” he told the press after the fight at Madison Square Garden, with none of the bravado you might expect from a man who’d just won a career-defining fight. “I’ve never been as scared in my life as fighting this guy, but you know what? I’ve got a lot of power too and I believe in myself. I really believe in myself.” He got that belief from his dad.
“This man right here, my father, has worked harder than anybody,” he added in the press room, which had likely got a little bit dusty. “So, this belt right here is dedicated to my father.”
It was an emotional moment.
“It’s really hard for me to say when I actually started training,” Tom says. “Because my dad was so heavily involved in it, I was just always ‘at the gym’. For as long as I can remember. Even if I wasn’t training. There was never a day where it was like ‘this is the day I’m going to get involved with it’.
“It’s just something I’ve always done. It’s always been mine and my dad’s thing. If we walked out of here now, and my dad said ‘you know what, you should pull out of your fight next week and retire’, I would. Absolutely. His opinion matters a lot. He’s the GOAT of all dads.”
The pair are virtually joined at the hip. He’s there at every fight, every interview, even every training session. Andy has guided Tom Aspinall all the way to where he is now, sitting at the top of the UFC rankings, a position he’ll have to justify on 27 July, when he fights Curtis Blaydes at the Co-op Arena. He lost to Blaydes in 2022, but that was then. This is now.
With his success, of course, has come notoriety. As a down-to-earth lad from Atherton, it’s not something he’s particularly interested in. Which is why he accidentally ignored Mark Zuckerberg for months.
Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook and chairman of Meta, is a big UFC fan, and had reached out to Aspinall, just to say hi. Unbeknownst to Tom, that is.
“We were at Meta in New York, doing some stuff, learning about socials,” he says, matter-of-factly, as if it’s the most normal thing in the world to learn social media skills from its actual mothership. “The guy we were speaking with was talking about Mark Zuckerberg, and was saying ‘I think he follows you’. We went on the follow, and he’d messaged me. I’d not seen it. I’d left him there a few months.”
Leaving the boss of the world’s largest social media empire unread. Imagine.
Luckily, he messaged him back straight away from Meta HQ. They’re friends now. “He was very nice about it,” he laughs. “He was just saying congratulations after the fight. He was really nice. Nice guy.”
Even more insane than that, he’s looked out into the crowd and seen Donald Trump staring back at him too, during a fight. “That did throw me,” he says. “Crazy. Crazy experience. I tried not to think about it. But he was right there. A pretty mad experience, that.”
Considering his rarified lifestyle (when he’s not in a hot gymnasium punching and kicking sweaty bags, that is), you’d think any number of the more chi-chi venues in Manchester would be more suited to such a jet-set pugilist.
But ask him his favourite place to eat in the city, and it’s rather more humble – like the man himself. He’d rather be at Mediterranean taverna Dimitri’s, a Manchester institution for good reason, rather than, say, the upscale venues of Spinningfields.
“Love this place,” he says. “I find a lot of places in city centres are not as authentic. They’re a bit of a chain. But I think this is a pretty authentic place, the food’s great, the service is good. It’s proper. And the meatballs are next level.”
Indeed they are.
More episodes of mEats:
Jack Whitehall on being the first person to get their Nando’s black card revoked
The UK’s most famous restaurant critic Jay Rayner on his career and side hustle as a jazz pianist
Children of Zeus talk new album for 2021 & performing in a pandemic
