For Bo Nickal, UFC Des Moines fight against Reiner de Ridder 'means more than just a ranking'

Outside of Pennsylvania or maybe Romania, the UFC couldn’t have placed Bo Nickal onto a better card than its UFC Fight Night in Des Moines. When you think of Iowa, you think of things like corn, fullbacks and corn-fed wrestlers built like fullbacks. Nickal has the ears to fit in.

Maybe it’s because of the Miletich Fighting Systems back in the day, which was a Midwestern grindhouse in Bettendorf that produced so many of the UFC’s early champions. But there is something that screams old-school MMA about Iowa, in that it feels like a throwback to the men who ate nails.

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“I love it around here,” Nickal told Uncrowned this week from the so-called Hartford of the West. “These are my people. These are people that are just like me, cut from the same cloth. I think that in the Midwest especially, wrestling is just part of the culture. It’s part of your blood.”

Nickal is of course a Penn State man. He won three national titles wrestling there, and the adoration of the wrestling gentry. He pinned a lot of dudes over the course of his career in college, including a good many from (and in) the state of Iowa. Poor Sammy Brooks of Iowa State still can’t believe how quickly his shoulder blades overruled his will back in 2017, when Nickal pinned him in 38 seconds in Ames.

That’s what makes Nickal’s return to Iowa, to take on the Dutchman Reiner de Ridder, a sort of homecoming for a kindred spirit. He very much lives by the old ways of earning his stripes through blood, sweat and tears, because to him there’s nothing cliché about building up the gravel in the guts.

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“Iowa is similar to Pennsylvania, where you grow up, you wrestle as a kid, your dad did it, your uncles did it, your granddad did it, and it's a family thing,” he says. “It’s just part of the culture. I love that. I think that people around here, they appreciate the same things that I do. Hard work, discipline, family values and really pursuing a goal.

“So that’s something that I identify with them, and I’ve felt it walking around grocery stores or downtown. I’m getting a lot of support and a lot of love.”

What do we know about Bo? He is articulate. Media polished. In short, a ready-made professional. Nickal’s been in the spotlight for a decade, and what he does when the lights come on is physically bend people to his way of thinking. He has competed thousands of times. He has cut weight more efficiently and effectively than any yogi in the Himalayas. He has met with adversity and treated it with steely-eyed zeal, as if he eagerly awaits it.

And come Saturday night, Nickal will see how far he’s come in his evolution to MMA. He fought six times in the UFC over a span of 26 months, including twice on the Contender Series, where he needed less than two total minutes to declare himself ready.

Since then, the expectations have ranged from lofty to delusional, as some people believed him to be contender-ready by the time he starched the 9-to-1 underdog Jamie Pickett in his 2023 UFC debut. His victories over Val Woodburn and Cody Brundage felt perfunctory in the grand scheme of things, like some warm bodies for him to throw around on his way to the top of the middleweight division.

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How have his wrestling roots translated to the cage? In every fight, he’s been a massive favorite. Including in his last fight with Paul Craig, who scored a moral victory by becoming the first MMA fighter to take Nickal to the scorecards. Not that the scorecards were close. Nickal won 30-27 across the pile, which means he’s still waiting on his first big test.

Might that come against de Ridder, the former two-division ONE Championship titleholder who is off to a 2-0 start in the UFC? You ask Nickal and it’s like he’s a sophomore at Allen High School in Texas again, right on the verge of winning his first state title.

He lights up because he can’t wait to find out.

“I asked for the matchup, I think he's a great fighter,” he says. “This is a real test for me, and I think that that's why I do what I do, is I want to be tested. I don’t train as hard as I do, and sacrifice as much as I do, and go through all the little things that go through, just to beat easy guys.

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“I want to meet the best guys. And so that's why I think this fight's exciting is because I think that even though I’m unranked and he’s number 13, either of us could easily be top five in the division and be beating a lot of the best guys. For me, this fight means more than just a ranking and more than just a number. It’s a big fight for me.”

Because Nickal has come so highly decorated into his career as a mixed martial artist, each step feels like completing a stage in a video game. How far can he take things? Does he have the full arsenal to become a champion? Time will tell, but he is a masochist when it comes to preparation. Running the most famous training grounds in Pennsylvania since Muhammad Ali at Deer Lake, he opened ATT Happy Valley in 2022 as a sort of personal theater of pain. The cast of characters he brings to make his life hell at Pleasant Gap has a way of making his actual opposition feel altogether less daunting.

The idea is similar to what they did at Miletich’s back in the day. Spend your days getting your ego beaten down to the studs so that fight night feels like a cakewalk.

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“I put myself around guys like [PFL’s] Johnny Eblen, [five-time collegiate national champion] Carter Starocci, just unbelievable wrestling talent — Yaroslav Amosov, too,” he says. “There's tons of guys that I'm able to get working with that really push me, and that's part of what I love about the sport. I love pushing myself every day and trying to break myself down, and then build myself back up slowly.”

In other words, Nickal is more Iowa than Iowa itself. And should he beat de Ridder on Saturday night in his home away from home, an even bigger homecoming could be on the horizon.

There’s a fighting chance his next fight could be a headlining spot at the Bryce Jordan Center in State College.

“We’re going to do it,” he says. “I’ve already had talks with the UFC. I’ve had talks with Penn State and Bryce Jordan, and I think you can get about 17,000 people in there with the way the UFC does it. We're going to stack it up to the brim, fill it full of people, and that’s going to be an unreal event. We're going to make that happen.

“I would love to see it later this year. But that’s TBD. There's a lot of moving parts, so we'll see. But at some point, it’ll happen.”