A pro since 2008, Villanueva has been paying his dues since the start, and he’s got the bumps and bruises and the 18-12 record to prove it. But now that he’s reached the top of the sport in the UFC, the light heavyweight veteran says that he wouldn’t change a thing because that upbringing in the sport sets him apart from many of his peers.
“These kids are spoiled nowadays,” he said. “They’re spoiled and they’ve got everything. Back then, we didn’t have nothing. ‘Hey man, I got this guy.’ ‘When am I fighting? You’re fighting in Frisco, fighting in Dallas, fighting in Amarillo.’ We didn’t have options. You gotta go fight. There was no, hey, I gotta cherry pick my record and get to 10-0 and then we can go take a tough fight.”
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Villanueva lost his pro debut. Six fights in and he was 3-3, having just lost a bout to future UFC fighter Cody Donovan. This was all while working a full-time job and raising a family.
“There’s no easy road,” he said. “You can have your bad times, but when you have your bad times, you got kids looking up to you. I have my wife, I got a family, I got nephews, I got kids I coached up in life.”
A participation trophy isn’t enough for guys like Villanueva. So when the wins came, he moved forward, when the losses happened, he didn’t let them take him from his path. And like Tom Villanueva before him, Ike’s goal was simple, to give his kids a better shot than what he had.
“That’s the blue-collar dream,” he said. “My dad and his family, when they came down here to America, it was for a better life for our kids, and I always want my son to do better than me. If he don’t have to get punched and hit in the head for a living, go and do that route. He made me proud, and I feel like I’m almost there. My son can do that, and I’ve got my stepson, he’s getting looks at college, so if they can get these scholarships, it’s awesome. It’s the American dream. Dream big.”
