Reno’s Payton Talbott, a new kind of fighting man

RENO — On a baking-hot night in Las Vegas at the end of June, Payton Talbott stood in a chain link cage across from a man he needed to hurt. He dropped his arms loose to his sides and shook them out. His mouth hung slightly open, eyes flat and expressionless. His opponent stared back.

In the cage, Talbott says, everything else drops away. The referee disappears. The fans disappear. Life becomes simple.

At 26, Talbott is one of the fastest rising stars in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the largest organization for the sport of mixed martial arts in the world. He is 5 feet 10 inches tall, weighs in at 136 pounds and has more than 70 inches of reach on his punches, which he deploys with a creative, flashy style that has captivated fans.

He also dresses, on occasion, in mesh crop tops; appears in videos pole-dancing; and records experimental audiovisual projects with an eclectic list of collaborators, including the electronica artist Arca, who is transgender, and the mercurial singer Frank Ocean.

Talbott knows that he is an anomaly in his chosen discipline. So, too, does the UFC’s fan base, members of which have speculated widely on his masculinity, sexuality and fighting ability, filling comment sections with insults, jibes and occasional support.

“I just think in my head, like — why do I have to be manly?” Talbott said. “Why does my image and what I wear have anything to do with my fighting? And even if it did — what do you care?”

Somewhat unavoidably, people do care. In the past half-decade, the UFC has become a touchstone for the new form of brash, bro-y masculinity sweeping through popular culture. Tech founders like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk have egged each other on to fight in a cage match, and Zuckerberg has both trained and competed in martial arts. The UFC’s president, Dana White, is a friend and ally of President Donald Trump, who has become the organization’s most prominent fan and recently promised to hold a fighting event on the White House lawn next year.

In the gym, fighters say, ability, respect and dedication to the sport are the only currencies that matter. But online, and in the public eye, Talbott finds himself at the unlikely nexus of a culture war that cannot be settled in the cage.

In the Gym

Talbott came to the sport the same way many of its stars do. After some experience wrestling in high school, he walked into a mixed martial arts gym as an angry 19-year-old looking for the kind of combat he’d seen on TV.

“I was not in a good place,” Talbott said. “So it was therapeutic to just go for two hours every day and fight strangers.”

Talbott’s gym, Reno Academy of Combat, sits in a small shopping plaza, and has two entrances: one to the MMA gym, and the other to the gun store and indoor firing range.

The head coach and owner, Rick Collup, a grizzled former fighter from the lawless era of early-2000s underground MMA, runs the gym in laissez-faire fashion. In the bathroom, a neatly printed sign reads: “Please clean up your own blood and throw up.”

“The first day I was there, I sparred,” Talbott said, referring to a practice fight. Like many new students, he thought sparring was meant to be performed at “100%” intensity, which made him stand out — and not in a good way.

“One of the fighters pulled me aside and was like, ‘You’re going to go with me next round,’” Talbott remembered. That fighter beat him up, he said, badly.

Until this year, Talbott held an undefeated professional record of 9-0, with several highlight-reel knockouts. But in the cage in January, facing a veteran named Raoni Barcelos, Talbott floundered. The older and far bulkier Barcelos threw him around the ring, raining down strikes and decisively winning the fight.

Online, comments sections exploded. One commenter suggested Talbott should stick to pole dancing and painting his nails.

Talbott said he struggled with severe vertigo for weeks after the match. When he recovered, however, he was eager to get back in the cage. In early June, the UFC asked him to step in on short notice to square up against the Brazilian fighter Felipe Lima, another one of the sport’s rising stars in the 135-pound bantamweight division.

It was a risky decision: Consecutive losses can crush an up-and-coming fighter’s prospects. Particularly poor performances can cause the UFC boss White to unceremoniously dump a fighter from the roster.

With 10 days to go, Talbott was back in the gym, focusing on drilling specific scenarios he might encounter in fighting Lima. Collup hovered around the cage, arms crossed, making small corrections.

Not a ‘Woke’ Fighter

Earlier that day, Talbott was hanging around his room in a T-shirt, soccer shorts and Adidas sambas, working on a new album — one of his “side quests,” or hobbies, which include skateboarding, urban exploring and an array of artistic pursuits.

Sprawled on the couch, before setting to work on a DJ deck, he reflected on how his experience as a fighter had shaped how he expressed himself outside of the cage.

“I think when I first started getting good at MMA, I felt a need to balance that out,” Talbott said. “The stronger I felt, I also felt like I needed to feminize myself when appropriate. I think it’s just like a subconscious thing.”

As for his sexuality, Talbott declined to comment on rumors that have swirled over the past year romantically linking him to Ocean, the singer-songwriter. In March, Talbott posted a YouTube video that featured a 25-second clip of Ocean singing an unreleased song, and the two occasionally appear on each other’s social media feeds. (Representatives for Ocean did not respond to requests for comment.)

“Who I’m trying to have sex with is none of your business, unless I’m trying to have sex with you,” Talbott said.

Andre Fili, 35, a veteran UFC fighter and one of Talbott’s close friends, said he found Talbott’s individuality inspiring. “He’s doing what I wanted to do when I first got to the UFC,” Fili said in a phone interview.

Talbott is uninterested, though, in being the “woke” UFC fighter, as he put it. Between rounds of the video game Elden Ring, Talbott’s roommate, a childhood friend, asked him how he felt about being seen as a role model for a different sort of masculinity in the UFC.

“I don’t feel like I owe anyone anything,” Talbott replied, sounding annoyed. “I think I’m just going to try to be myself and the people who get it will get it.”

In the gym, at least, these distinctions matter little. “If you can fight you can fight,” Fili added.

Still, the sport’s culture has often elevated figures who exemplify a certain brand of all-American machismo, said Luke Thomas, a combat sports analyst who closely covers the UFC. Some of its most recognizable faces include the brash American wrestler Michael Chandler and the unfiltered trash-talk artist Sean Strickland.

Back in the Ring

On the night of his fight against Lima, Talbott entered the arena to a walkout song he had produced himself: a remix of an electronica song by Arca that sampled the Deftones’ “Feiticeira.”

In the opening minute of the match, Lima came forward swinging hard, catching Talbott several times. After a few more minutes, Lima dove forward into a takedown, hoping to pin Talbott to the mat, but Talbott wriggled out and rolled, ending up on top, raining down punches.

“He’s showing great improvement in his grappling — great improvement!” Joe Rogan, that evening’s commentator, crowed on the UFC’s broadcast.

In round two, Talbott stalked Lima around the cage. Lima shot takedowns again and again. Again, Talbott defended. At one point, after pummeling Lima on the floor, Talbott stepped back and allowed his opponent to get up.

“Payton, don’t play with him!” Collup shouted from the corner.

But now Talbott was having fun. He broke into a grin. In the third round, the crowd got on his side, chanting, as they did for many American fighters: “USA! USA! USA!”

“He’s living up to the hype,” Rogan exclaimed.

The fight ended after three full five-minute rounds. After a short deliberation, the judges gave their verdict: Talbott was the winner, by unanimous decision.

“I love my job, I really do,” he said after the fight. On Instagram, he posted “#stillemployed,” beneath a clip of highlights.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.