FOREHEAD, chest, left shoulder, right… Caolan Loughran taps out the sign of the cross on his body with his right hand as he’s introduced to the hostile crowd.
He wouldn’t be the first Christian to be thrown to the lions in Rome but he had no intention of going out like that and, roughly seven minutes later, that same right hand whips through his Italian opponent’s guard and crashes into his chin.
The uppercut sends him staggering backwards into the cage and, after 30 one-sided seconds more, it’s all over. Loughran is the Cage Warriors bantamweight champion.
More importantly, he has smashed through the glass ceiling that leads to the UFC.
The UFC (Ultimate Fighting Championship) is the dream for all mixed martial artists: It is the ultimate, the highest level, where the biggest fights are and the real money is.
And it’s where Kildress native Loughran is now. Tonight the 27-year-old makes his debut at UFC Paris against French fighter Taylor Lapilus (live on TNT and Virgin Media from 7pm). If all goes well, and he has total confidence that it will, he’ll be off to Vegas next and hunting down world champion Sean O’Malley.
What a journey he’s been on since he swapped Tyrone for Liverpool six years ago with hardly a penny in his pocket. All he had was talent and a burning ambition to go to the very top.
That’s where he’s going.
WHEN I rang he was waking up from an afternoon snooze.
“I had a hard morning sparring,” he explains in a Tyrone accent undiluted by years on Merseyside.
“Ah brutal lad”.
We go right back to the start and he tells how he stumbled upon mixed martial arts after injuries shattered his Gaelic Football dreams. The Kildress Wolfe Tone’s club ran boxing classes for young players during the winter months and that experience gave Loughran the idea to give something else a try.
“I wouldn’t say I was a great footballer or anything, I was alright, but I took it very seriously,” he says.
“I was obsessed with it at the time – of course I was. Like every lad in Tyrone, all you care about is kicking a ball about.
“Then, when I was 15-16, I started getting very serious knee injuries. The rehab was getting very boring, very monotonous and I was starting to get very interested in MMA with the whole rise of Connor McGregor. So I went down to the MMA gym and I just instantly became hooked on it. I never went back to the football.”
KNEE injuries persisted into his amateur MMA career. He tore his ACL during a fight but, like the hero in The Karate Kid movie, he was able to knock his opponent out on one leg.
“I was hopping on my left leg and he over-swung and I just clocked him on the way in,” he explained.
“I put him out, thank God, because I couldn’t have come out for the next round.”
That tells you something about Loughran’s punching power. If he catches you clean with his right hand it’s lights out. But opponents soon get wise to your strengths and he realised he needed more in his locker.
“It’s like a game of snakes and ladders, this sport,” he says.
“You climb your way up and then a loss puts you back down but you just have to keep climbing.”
He beat all-comers in Ireland. He won all the Irish titles and was number-one ranked in the country as an amateur. The bar went up when he started representing Ireland in Cage Warriors European tournaments. For the first time, he had to deal with losing.
They say you learn more from your losses than your wins and that was the case for him.
“Defeat is a pivotal part of sport, it’s a pivotal part of anything in life,” he says.
“It’s all part of the journey and I learned a lot from the second loss. This lad from Liverpool beat me and I realised my wrestling wasn’t up to scratch.”
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IF you can’t beat them join them, as they say. He packed his bags and moved to Liverpool. Aged 21, he turned up on the doorstep of Colin Heron’s Team Kaobon gym.
Perhaps the best in Europe, Kaobon had a proven record for bringing fighters through to the UFC but there is no easy path to the top.
Loughran knew he’d have to battle every inch of the way but he was up for that and he lived like a warrior monk. For the first 10 months, he spent his nights on a fold-up bed in a little windowless room at the back of the gym and his days training like a demon.
“I didn’t know one person, I had about 150 quid in the bank, I had no job,” he says.
“I was never starving but it was tough at times. There was no TV… There were no windows in the place I slept, it was literally a wee box room at the back of the gym. It was tight going.
“It was me and a Brazilian boy, the two of us were just slumming it but it’s character-building and, when I look back on it now, it showed how much I wanted it. It showed that I believed I could get here, didn’t it?
“I think my ma and da thought I was nuts when I went over and they were probably right. Some young lad from Tyrone thinking he was gonna fight in the UFC? People would probably have said I was stupid, I was delusional.
“I can understand why they thought that because it had literally never happened before for anyone from where I’m from. So why would anyone believe it could happen for me?
“I had won all the titles in Ireland so I knew I wasn’t completely delusional but I realised that if I was going to do this properly, if I was going to have a chance at it, then going to the most proven gym in this part of the world would be a good idea.”
AND so he trained, he sparred, he watched, listened and studied and he improved. He made his professional debut in September 2019 and needed just 90 seconds to knock out his opponent.
His second fight didn’t make it to the end of the first round either, neither did the third...
“I had just turned 23 and I thought: ‘This is deadly, I’m gonna be in the UFC in a couple of years’,” he says.
Then Covid came along and the world came to a standstill.
The pub he worked in at weekends closed, there were no fights… He couldn’t earn money and thought to himself: “Is this over?” He was out of the cage for nearly two years but again he saw opportunity in adversity and worked harder than ever.
“I kept getting fights booked and then, the week of the show, they would be pulled for Covid,” he explains.
“Four or five times in-a-row that happened over a year and I thought: ‘This isn’t gonna happen’.
“But in hindsight it was probably the best thing that happened to my career and it was character-building as well because I got two years to focus on skill and I’m at a much higher skill level.”
When life returned to normal, he signed with the Cage Warriors promotion. It is the level below UFC and the tried-and-tested route to get there - Connor McGregor was a Cage Warriors champion before most of us had ever heard of him.
“It’s the hardest way to do it because every prospect in Europe has the goal to fight in the UFC and we all fight each other in Cage Warriors,” Loughran explains.
“Whoever can win that belt makes himself the top guy in Europe. That’s what I did.”
His opponent in Rome in May was unbeaten local favourite Dylan Hazan. The title and the passport to UFC was on the line. Loughran - clean cut with a boy-next-door haircut – skipped on the spot on his side of the cage as the Italian snarled on the other.
By the end of the first five-minute round Loughran was looking too sharp for Hazan and the end came early in the second when ‘the Don’ landed that stunning right uppercut.
“He (Hazan) was 9-0 and he had wrestled in the World Championships for Italy – he had rag-dolled everybody,” Loughran explains.
“I was 8-0 so we were both undefeated, we were two of the top prospects in Europe. There was a LOT on the line.
“You try and climb up the ladder against the other prospects, you try and establish yourself as the top guy in Europe and win a big show and, thank God, that’s what I did.”
A few weeks later, Loughran’s coach at Team Kaobon got everyone together and went through a rigmarole about renovations to the gym. Then he added: ‘This is all a load of bullshit, what I’m actually here to tell you is: Welcome to the UFC Caolan…’
“It was deadly,” says Loughran.
“It was a special thing to tell my family, my friends, my girlfriend and everybody that I’d got the contract and: ‘I told yiz I would do it!’
“The UFC is like signing for Manchester United or Liverpool… It’s the pinnacle of our sport. It’s huge. This one is in Paris but after this most of my fights are going to be in Vegas. It’s mad.
“It all depends on how I perform. If I lose two or three in-a-row they could sack me. I have a four-fight deal at the minute but after this fight, or after two fights, I believe I’ll have a new deal.”
So has he made it now? What’s next: His own brand of whiskey?
“Nooooooo, I’m still broke,” he says.
“I haven’t fought in the UFC yet, but Saturday night should change a lot. It’s like everything, it’s about how you perform and that will very much control how much I get paid.
“There are boys in the UFC who are absolutely broke and there’s other boys who are spinning about in yachts and Lamborghinis. So it’s very much a case of how you perform.”
Do Lamborghinis and yachts appeal to him?
“Well, it’s not the be-all and end-all, but I’d rather be driving a Lamborghini than my Astra,” he says.
HE’S a boxer/wrestler with a pressure style and he will hunt down every opponent the UFC put him in the cage with, beginning with Paris tonight.
“It’s a game of the mind,” he says.
“It’s all in the head and it’s all technique and timing. I come forward and I put your back into the cage and if I grab a hold of you, you’re going down, simple as that. If I connect with a clean right hand, you’re staying hit. I’m coming at everyone in the UFC, I’m not coming to tap and toe and run away, I’m going to meet the best guys in the world head-on, I come to fight.”
Taylor Lapilus, his opponent tonight, is also making his UFC debut. Loughran says he has studied the Frenchman “extensively” and says with certainty that he’ll be a clear winner in the Accor Arena in Paris.
“I’m the biggest favourite on the whole card and I think that’s with good reason,” he adds matter-of-factly.
“I came the hardest route by winning a Cage Warriors title, I’ve fought the best guys in Europe and he’s been fighting on wee regional shows.
“I’ve been operating at a different level for the last two and-a-half years, simple as that. I think he’s cannon fodder.”
The fight is the opener on the main card in Paris so winning and looking good doing so will transform his profile and send him rocketing up the UFC ladder closer and closer to Sean O’Malley, the UFC bantamweight world champion.
The American won the title last month and Loughran’s sole sporting purpose in life will be to take it from him.
“I want to punch his head in,” he says.
“I like him but he’s the target, he’s the one with the big name and all the following and I want to break his jaw. It might take me two-three years to get up to a title fight but I’ll be putting him on notice in Paris, I’ll be grabbing the microphone and letting him know who I am.
“I’m going to be champion. I’ve achieved every single thing I started out to achieve, so why would I not be confident of winning the belt?”
Ten years’ ago, he went to his first MMA session back in Tyrone and he left the gym believing that he would make it to the UFC and become world champion one day.
“I don’t know why I thought that then,” he says.
“But I did.”
Look how far he has come.
If you don’t have a dream, how you gonna have a dream come true?
