It’s the side of the fight game few see, or even know about. So while most see the finished product and say, “I want to be like Natan Levy,” if there are aspiring mixed martial artists back in Israel who want to follow him into the UFC, wanting it isn’t enough. There’s work and sacrifice that takes place far from the bright lights. And some don’t want to dig that deep.
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“There are people that have more grit and people that have less,” said Levy. “And I can tell you for a fact that I’ve seen hundreds of fighters coming to Vegas in the hopes of becoming big UFC stars, UFC champions, talking a big game and being gone a couple weeks later. Maybe a couple months later, some of them are looking for a job to pay for their training, to be able to live and get a job somewhere here in Vegas. Then they make a lot of money in tips and all of a sudden they start working, not for the training, but working for the money and training sometimes to never training, to just being some person that lives here and works at the pool. I’ve seen it a hundred times. If you want to have a comfortable life, for example, and you say, oh, I want my own apartment, I want this, I want that, then yeah, you’ve got to work a full-time job. You can’t be a fighter and you can’t train full-time. But if you want to train full-time, you have to sometimes work a lot and save money and then go and train for a month or two or more without working. Obviously, it’s not easy. There are big sacrifices that you have to make.”
Levy made them, and they paid off when he got a shot on Dana White’s Contender Series in November of 2020. A submission win over Shaheen Santana earned the Israeli standout a UFC contract, and after losing his debut a year later to Rafa Garcia, he defeated Mike Breeden and Genaro Valdez, cementing his place in the always tough lightweight division. But don’t confuse that current situation with complacency.
