Mayfair’s Kyle Daukaus is embarking upon his UFC career

The Father Judge High School graduate is 1-1 and currently ranked as the 52nd middleweight MMA fighter in the world.

Story by Josh Safran

It was a blistering June afternoon in 2011 on the football field of Father Judge High School, one  of those days where the heat bounces off the turf pellets and radiates through the soles of your shoes.  

Students collected their diplomas and launched their caps in the air; smiling, thinking about where life would take them next.  For most the answer was college, but not for Kyle Daukaus.

For him, this ceremony just meant more time away from the octagon.  His next step in life came in the form of his first amateur fight just days away –  against a man seven years his elder.

“If you look back now, it’s kind of crazy that I would have even stepped foot in that cage,” Daukaus said.

The wide eyed 18-year-old went toe to toe with a 25-year-old named Devon Harrel, who’s picture on Tapology.com is Chuck Norris dual wielding machine guns. Daukaus really didn’t put up much of a fight.  He was submitted easily in the third round, apparently “demonstrating a severe lack of defensive know-how from his back,” according to an anonymous Tapology fight recap.

Today, Daukaus holds a 1-1 record in the UFC and is currently ranked as the 52nd middleweight MMA fighter in the world.  Even after making it to the highest level in his profession, the road has not been an easy one, especially with a global pandemic sandwiched between fights.  Though both professionals, Daukaus and his brother Chris train and instruct out of Martinez BJJ on Cottman Avenue, just a 30-minute drive up I-95 from Temple.

Growing pains are unwanted and simultaneously unavoidable, something a young Daukaus was ready to accept.  Growing up in the Philly area, most boys reenact the likes of Allen Iverson, Brian Dawkins and Chase Utley.  

Not Daukaus, who knew he wanted to fight professionally from a very young age, unlike most of his current counterparts. The average age of a professional athlete in the four major US sports is 27.5, but the average age of the top 25 fighters in the UFC middleweight division is 32.7 years old.

“We (Kyle and his brother) watched the UFC all the time… We would train and roll on the ground and do jiu jitsu on the ground as best as we could just based off of watching videos on Youtube and watching UFC fights,” Daukaus recounted.

Though not yet training, the seed was planted in the minds of the Daukaus brothers.  Shortly thereafter, Kyle’s brother Chris saw an advertisement for a grappling tournament taking place in Lancaster.  On a whim, 16-year-old Kyle decided to enter alongside his brother, but not without permission of their mother, of course.

“We were like ‘Yo, we want to go do this’ and she had no idea what was going on. Had no idea what it consisted of,” Daukaus said. “She just knew that it was a grappling tournament in Lancaster and that we wanted to do it.”

Maybe Sarah Daukaus really didn’t know what she was getting into, or maybe she was just thrilled to see the boys getting active together.  Either way, the support from mom was an essential first step and has played a role in both brothers’ careers to this day.

At this point, Kyle was simply getting his feet wet in the fighting landscape and learning what it’s like to grapple with people who weren’t his brother and just getting a feel for the fight scene.  Then the Daukaus brothers took a major leap – joining their first MMA gym.

“My brother found the gym when I was in high school,” Daukaus said.  “He would drive by the gym to and from school, and one day he just committed fully and walked in.  That’s all it takes is the first day. He loved it.”

Much like the grappling tournament, Kyle’s brother Chris decided on a whim to take fighting outside of their Philly basement and into a real gym.  After returning home from the gym and reporting back to Kyle, the younger Daukaus brother wanted in, too.

“I remember (my first day) like yesterday,” Kyle said with a chuckle. “It’s a little ridiculous.  I rolled my ankle in lacrosse practice a week before, so I had my ankle taped up, I had my TapOut shorts on, I had a rash guard on. Yeah, I was ready to go… I probably looked ridiculous, but it is what it is.”

Shortly after beginning training, Kyle graduated high school in 2011 and lost his first amateur fight.  He trained through the summer and decided to take a few classes at Community College of Philadelphia, but found himself daydreaming about his true passion.

“To be honest once I found fighting, that’s all I thought about during school.  I was in math class just thinking, ‘Ugh I need to train tonight, this is taking away from my training’…   I failed an algebra class, I took an english class and that was about it,” Daukaus recounted.

In a situation similar to Kyle’s, many parents may give their children a push toward education.  However, throughout this journey his mother, Sarah Daukaus, has been the most important figure in Kyle’s fight corner.

“My mom has been my number one supporter from the very beginning,” Kyle said.  “As soon as I told her I wanted to fight she was like, ‘All right,  you have to be fully into it.’ I would take a day off and slack off a little bit during my amateur days and she would get on me.”

Now with mom’s approval, Kyle put any thoughts of college or work to bed and bet on himself.  The real signifier of this was joining Martinez BJJ in 2012, training alongside professional MMA fighters at the young age of 19.  

“I was an amateur training with professionals.  I was training just as hard as them and they were showing me the way,” Daukaus said.  “Back then, training and fighting against older guys and grown men was scary, but now it’s just another face across the cage.  The dude can be six years older or he can be 18 years old, I’m going to go in with the same mindset every time.”

Since joining the gym in 2012, Kyle has gone from trainee to trainer,  a transition that was far from easy, highlighted by a treacherous beginning to his amateur career, going 1-3 in his first four fights.  However, much like the all time greats, Daukaus was unwavering when asked if he ever had second thoughts.

“It’s always been fighting, I’ve thrown all my chips on the table for this fighting thing and it’s paying off now,” he said. “It just shows that the people that were telling you, ‘you need to get a job or you need to get an education,’ it’s proved them wrong, so, it’s that much better.”  

It took a total of 8 years, 10 months, and 23 days for Kyle to cash out the chips he laid out on the proverbial MMA table.  That was the time it took from Daukaus’ first amateur fight to his UFC debut.  A glance at varying MMA sites will show the middleweight from Philly went 5-5 in his amateur career and is 10-1 professionally, but fail to show the victories and defeats outside of the ring.

For a while after Daukaus declared to himself and his family that he wanted to be a professional fighter, he just worked, working to make money and at his craft.  He worked landscaping, sold Christmas trees, and even worked at Sesame Place in Langhorne as a ride operator at one point, but the one thing all of his jobs had in common was hatred.

“It was hell honestly,” Daukas said  “Every time I was working I would tell them, ‘I know I’m new, but I need to be out of here by 6:30 because I need to go to the gym.’ So every single time I’d work I made sure I would get out as quick as I could, and that didn’t really go well with people.” 

For five years Daukaus worked jobs he hated, trained as hard as he could, and accepted amateur fights seeing varying degrees of success.  The grind started to become worth it in the summer of 2016, when Cage Fury Fighting Championship’s fight card saw a litany of cancellations.

Daukaus was thrown into the fight card as a replacement against a fighter who was on a similar career arc, Tyler Bayer.  

There isn’t much coverage of the bout aside from a page where fight fans were able to click and predict the winners of each fight from that card.  Only 9% of voters chose Daukaus to win, and after a rear naked choke in the 2nd round, Kyle Daukaus made the other 91% feel foolish.

Following that upset, Daukaus caught the eyes of many local fight promoters and began his professional career.  Though labelled a professional, Daukaus had a long way to go until the UFC and more importantly a long way to go until the money started coming in.  It was still a life of landscaping, instructing, training, and of course fighting.

Following the surprise victory in his 2016 CFFC (Cage Fighting Fury Championship) bout, Daukaus went on a 10-fight win streak.  This streak is characterized by three major traits that have pushed him throughout his entire career: grit, consistency, and being in the right place at the right time.

Much like his CFFC victory in 2016 coming as a result of cancellations, a slew of dropouts in a 2019 CFFC fight card granted an unexpected opportunity for Daukaus.  After his opponent withdrew, an opening for the co-main event and middleweight CFFC championship opened up against an ex-UFC talent Jonavin Webb, where once again Daukaus was a heavy underdog.

“I’ve always been confident in my abilities,” Daukaus said. “I’ve always known that I can compete with any of the fighters in the division. I just needed a shot.”

Kyle choked Webb unconscious as the bell rang in the final round, an MMA equivalent to a championship winning buzzer beater.  That surprise victory put the name Kyle Daukaus on the radar for many hard core fight fans and more importantly a fight on Dana White’s Contender Series in June of 2019.

White, the president of the UFC, created the UFC’s version of a side-story in the form of his contender series.  Professional UFC fight events take place on Saturdays with the best fighters in the world duking it out week in and week out.  White created his contender series to take place on Tuesday nights, giving 10 of the best non-UFC fighters in the country an opportunity to fight in front of him and potentially earn a UFC contract.

Daukaus took care of business and won by unanimous decision in his bout.  Two fighters that night were offered contracts, but Daukaus was not one of them.  He returned back to the CFFC, where he defended his belt easily in his next two fights.

“I defended the belt in February and then everything shut down,” he said. “My biggest concern was fighting, but also making money.  I teach at the gym so I make money through that, but the majority of the money that I make is from fighting.”

After years of an absolute grind, it seemed Daukaus’ career was coming to a crescendo, only to be put on pause by a pandemic. He got back to landscaping and kept himself afloat at the start of quarantine, but never took his eyes off the prize.

“After that win everybody was pushing for me to get signed.  I was talking to my manager and he said, ‘they know who you are.’…  They knew that if they needed me they could just call me up and that’s what they did,” Daukaus said.

Due to health and safety concerns on June 4, 2020, Ian Heinisch had to pull out of his fight against Brendan Allen that was scheduled for June 27.  A common theme in the career of Kyle Daukaus is being in the right place at the right time.  Much like cancellations in the CFFC led to his two most important fights, just 11 days before fight day, on June 16, Daukaus’ management team announced over social media that Kyle would be taking Ian Heinisch’s place on just 11 day’s notice, and finally making his UFC debut.

“Yeah, it was 11 days notice,” he said. “I cut the weight. It wasn’t that hard for me to cut the weight.  Before I got the call I was training for a fight in August in the contender series again.” 

Daukaus’’s UFC debut was an extremely valiant one.  A classic tale in sports, the unglamorous grinder in the form of Daukaus takes a fight on 11 days notice, pitted against one of the flashy up and comers in the form of Brendan Allen.

Daukaus lost his first fight via unanimous decision, but the judges’ score cards show him winning the third and final round. Though it goes down an L in the record books, the lesser known Daukaus proved he has the ability to hang at this level.

“I mean, people were saying that I did win the fight, (people) were saying I did lose the fight,” he said.  “I lost the fight according to the judges and that’s all that matters… I think the reason that the judges gave him the fight is because I ended up at the bottom of every single round.”

Regardless of the result, that fight was Daukaus’ springboard.  He was rewarded for his performance in his debut with a bout against Dustin Stoltzfus on the UFC 255 card.  Daukaus dominated and is currently scheduled to fight again on May 8 against Phil Hawes.  

In all sports, and especially fighting, athletes out of Philadelphia are often talked about in a certain way, a gritty, hardworking underdog.  When Daukaus was asked if the fighting out of Philly schtick gets old he said, “Yeah, it definitely does, I think, it’s because of the whole Rocky thing and everybody loves the whole Rocky thing.  We’re just hard workers, I think that’s all it is.”

And while Daukaus may get tired of the Philadelphia fighting cliches, he’s a living, breathing example of why they hold true.