Think taking on one fight in one night is tough? Try two.
Chris Wade has been there, and he’s done with that.
Fortunately for the Long Island native, that wasn’t a worry during this year’s Professional Fighters League playoffs. Wade emerged as a finalist in the featherweight division and he’ll face Movlid Khaybulaev at Wednesday’s championship event at Seminole Hard Rock Hotel & Casino in Hollywood, Fla., with the winner claiming a $1 million prize in the featherweight division.
“It felt great. It did,” Wade told The Post recently via Zoom regarding his breakthrough semifinals victory on Aug. 27 over Bubba Jenkins.
“There was a lot of emotion there for different reasons, but I knew in my head all along that I probably should have already been the champ of the PFL earlier on and that I made some mistakes on my own, and I had a tough fight not going my way in the first season. I’m just so happy to be one step away now from this million dollar championship.”
Unlike the league’s first two seasons, the 2021 regular season determined just a top four for each of its six weight classes. Back in 2018 and 2019, though, Wade (20-6, six finishes) would have needed to win a two-round quarterfinal bout and then a semifinal fight all in the same night.
Each time, Wade earned a decision in the quarters. And each time, he lost a decision in the semis. He doesn’t miss the old format, which he didn’t learn had been replaced until after the season was underway.
For the first season, which came after the UFC chose not to re-sign him off a victory and with a 5-2 record in the promotion, Wade was psyched by the prospect of fighting twice in one night.
“The first year I was like, ‘Let’s do this,’” an enthusiastic Wade said. “‘I’m a wrestler. I grew up in wrestling and tournaments where you just keep competing all day. This is like right up my alley,”
And that first year wasn’t so bad in the 34-year-old Wade’s estimation. He says he fought well in his split decision loss to eventual champion Natan Schulte in the 2018 semifinals, which took place about 90 minutes after his majority decision victory over Robert Watley.
But 2019 posed a different problem:. After dispatching Nate Andrews in the ninth bout of the evening, a pair of quick finishes left only about a 40-minute buffer before he took on Loik Radzhabov — a finalist in this year’s lightweight season — in the main event. Wade admits he was tactically preparing for the fighter Radzhabov beat, Islam Mamedov, and hadn’t studied up on his actual opponent. Exhausted by his own assessment, he lost a unanimous decision.
“That was a wake up call for me,” Wade said. “It told me, damn, this two-fight-in-one-night thing kind of sucks, actually. I don’t like it. … So I am so happy that they canned it this season. I don’t think that, in mixed martial arts, you should go back in there; only one time a night. It’s too much of an adrenaline dump. I just personally don’t believe in that.”
This season, everything lined up for Wade. He needed only to prepare for former NCAA Division I champion wrestler Bubba Jenkins. Wade swept all three rounds on all three judges’ scorecards en route to a unanimous decision and his long-awaited berth in the PFL final. On the other side of the cage Wednesday will be Khaybulaev (18-0-1, eight finishes), who notched a split-decision victory over Brendan Loughnane in August to reach this point.
If Wade gets through the native of MMA-hotbed Dagestan, Russia, he’ll earn a seven-figure payout one year after living off savings and being out of commission while the 2020 PFL season was canceled by the COVID-19 pandemic. Earning such a lofty sum, in a sport not known for many avenues of reaching that financial bracket, would help to validate his journey in mixed martial arts.
“It’s gonna be amazing,” says Wade, with a grin, at the prospect of securing a life-changing payday. “It’s what I’ve worked and strove toward the entire time. … People are telling me, ‘Why are you doing this? Why are you fighting? You’re smart or you’re too good looking for that. Go get a job doing this or that. That’s such a tough way to make a living.’
“And just so many naysayers and so many people, even family, go, ‘Just take a regular job with benefits and a retirement [plan] and knock it off.’ This is for me. This is for believing in myself. This is what you get when you don’t quit in life and when you stick to what you know is true.”
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