Cory Sandhagen has just one mountain left to climb

Cory Sandhagen can see some of the mountains he’s climbed from his vantage point at the ONX Sports gym in Golden, Colorado. Sawtooth Mountain, one of the so-called 14ers, sits gently to the northwest off the Flatirons, and the ever-popular Bierstadt is just beyond the foothills. Sandhagen is a Colorado kid. He was born the same year that nearby Rocky Flats, the old nuclear productions facility, closed down for good in 1992.

“I’ve probably climbed 30 of those,” he says about those Rocky Mountains. “There were a couple I intended to, but they were too sketchy and I chickened out.”

On a Friday morning in early September, Sandhagen is at ONX working through drills with a training partner he brought in, former ONE featherweight champion Thanh Le. It is just the two of them alone in a cage — so alone that it feels like the session is being conducted in secret. Sandhagen is hunched over on the fence with Le on his back, continuously trying to dump him to the canvas. Meanwhile, Sandhagen attempts to wrest himself free from the hold. When he does, there is no fluid movement into an offensive of his own. Instead, they reset and do it again. And then again. This is a self-induced purgatory. You can hear the labored breathing in the quiet of the room.

What they are training for is Sandhagen’s UFC 320 title fight with Merab Dvalishvili, the Georgian tyranny of the bantamweight division who hasn’t lost in more than seven years.

To train for Dvalishvili, Sandhagen must fall in love with the toil, because if he doesn’t, well, go see what happened to Sean O’Malley. Go see what happened to Jose Aldo. Henry Cejudo. All the former champions Merab has broken with his pace and pressure over the last couple of years. To show up unprepared is to become a crash test dummy on fight night.

Being upright helps. No, being upright is essential. Because everyone knows the score here. Dvalishvili is supposed to go right through Sandhagen. Everyone understands this including Sandhagen, who mostly steers clear of the opinionated scrolls of social media.

“Too much negativity,” he says. “And I can’t stand influencers.”

Now they move to the ground, and Le, who was brought in from New Orleans to mimic Merab, drills from a dominant top position so that Sandhagen can work through a few different layers of hell. When he breaks free, there’s a moment where he spins into an offensive thought, only to hold it, for the time being, and do it again.

Each time through, little pieces of conversation. “A lot of wrestling is fighting through s****y spots with power,” he says to Le, as they reset. Le points out, again and again, what Merab likes to do.

“He doesn’t throw with power here, he uses these little hammer fists,” Le says, dropping little hammer fists.

The Sandhagen camp knows Merab isn’t rolling up to Las Vegas with any new wrinkles. What Merab brings is the same every time. Merciless cardio. Ceaseless pressure. Constant takedown action. Ground and pound. Control, control, control. The pursuit here is finding an opening to throw a wrench in the gears that will bring the machine crashing to a chugging halt, belching fumes as it shuts down at his feet. It’s that thought that endures through these mundanities of hell.

After an hour of fighting out of such positions, I ask Sandhagen, who looks like van Gogh with cauliflower filling in the missing bits of his ear, if he can find joy in this kind of training, or if sucks as bad as it appears.

“Oh, I think it sucks,” he says, with a little laugh. “It sucks. I think, especially in grappling, there’s this shoving match that goes on. You don’t break someone in kickboxing. You can out-technique someone in boxing, and boxing is a beautiful sport. You can certainly break someone there by making them feel, ‘Damn, I can’t do anything to them.’ But you break someone in grappling.”

Sandhagen is so down to earth that he doesn’t come off like a fighter at all. He’s so reserved that it took a few years for people to see that he had a personality, or for him to even realize he should show it. These days he’s been known to give some playful glimpses. One time he joked that he does mushrooms to get ready for fights, to see who might bite. Another time he boasted to have made $2 million in a single month posting pictures of his balls on OnlyFans, just to test the gullibility of the fight public.

“There’s a different level to grappling that is just much different, that you got to get used to,” he says. “It took me years to get used to it, years to kind of feel like I had to surrender to the fact that that’s how this s*** works. There is no secret to getting around some spots. It’s like, work is what wins you grappling exchanges.

“So yeah, it sucks, and it won’t be fun until you win.”

All around the cage there are UFC belts in frames with images of the people who won them. This is the house that Trevor Wittman built, quite literally. There are 11 belts in all, belonging to people like Rose Namajunas and Kamaru Usman. There’s also a BMF title, which Justin Gaethje held. Wittman and his son, Terrance, built just about everything on the premises themselves, including a centerpiece sauna with a cold plunge. It’s a house of champions, of which Sandhagen — perhaps surprisingly — finds himself on the verge of becoming.

That is, if he can beat Merab. The biggest word in the fight game’s lexicon is if. It has ruined men for centuries, and it has liberated a few too.

If…

“It’s totally like a delayed gratification,” he says. “I think that focus can be fun, and that having a challenge in front of me is fun — but getting tired as f*** and getting punched in the face, I don’t think that’s fun. I don’t think that coming in and having to be mega-focused and take it super serious is fun. It’s not fun. What’s fun is winning, and what’s fun is watching myself improve.”

When people talk about sacrifice, they are talking about a man in the throes of training for Merab Dvalishvili. Sandhagen has been watching himself improve for years. In fact, he’s been watching himself like any other curious onlooker.

We’ve seen Cory Sandhagen. We saw him quietly win his first five fights in the UFC, including a 2019 submission over Mario Bautista. We saw him crash into Aljamain Sterling during the pandemic, losing just 88 seconds into the fight via rear-naked choke. We’ve seen him flatline Frankie Edgar and take home bonus money with a spinning-kick knockout of Marlon Moraes.

He is one of those contenders who has had a ridiculously hard road. He’s had to come back from bad losses. He’s had to keep going through showcase wins. He’s fought the toughest dudes for a very long time, including a meeting with ex-flyweight champ Deiveson Figueiredo this past May, the fight that cinched his title shot.

When he says, “I felt there was nothing Figgy had for me at all,” it’s not the words of a blowhard. It’s the matter-of-fact voice of a guy who is being sincere.

Because it just so happens that the “Sandman” is a bit of an inward thinker. A philosopher of sorts, who likes to get a little existential. He says he “saved his nerd years for his 30s,” and in his free time, he likes to write. He has authored a work of fiction — a comic book — which he is currently having illustrated. It took him a couple of years to write it, and he describes the book as, “kind of like sci-fi meets spirituality/philosophical meets ‘Black Mirror.’”

“But I’m not very good at writing,” he makes sure to add. “That’s why I wrote a comic book. I tried to write an actual novel, and I literally wrote like two sentences, and I was like, ‘Holy s***, I suck.’ I wrote something like, ‘It all started in the middle of fall…’ and I was like, oh my God, no, I’m writing a comic book, f*** this.”

Sandhagen figures it takes 10 years to get really good at something, so by the time he’s in his mid-40s check back in on his writing chops. After all, his first professional MMA bout was 10 years ago, a win against a guy named Bruce Sessman in the podunk town of Williston, North Dakota, and look where he is now.

Fighting for a UFC title.

In those 10 years he has grown a great deal, both as a person and as a fighter. He has also grown better at combining the two.

“I just see my just existence — not to be weird — like it’s this vessel that I can really manipulate and change into whatever I need to change it to,” he says. “To make it what I say that I want, or whatever I’m going to value at whatever stage of life I’m in. And once I lost a couple of times, I was like, ‘I hate that feeling, therefore I’m going to change myself. I’ve got to change myself to be a winner.’”

Coaches sometimes see their fighters as blocks of clay. Sandhagen sees himself as something to build experiences through, a living, breathing form through which to carry out his commands. When it comes to matters of the ego, which is what the entire fight game is fueled on, he tends to tear it down as much as he builds it back up. When it comes to legacies, which is what fighters set out to define, he does his damndest to detach himself from the conversation..

“It feels really impersonal, the entire thing,” he says. “I don’t see myself as — I’m not very infatuated with myself and my legacy or whatever I am, but [I’m that way] so that I can understand how I work better.

“I do think that there’s a piece of me as a person that cares about having a legacy, and cares about the more material things in life, but then there’s also a version of me that I feel like I am more often than not, that is more just this thing that’s just experiencing all of it.”

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This latest experience is a wild one. A contender for the bantamweight title. There are people all over the greater Front Range of Denver ready to celebrate a Colorado-born champion. When he was younger, Sandhagen played basketball for Smoky Hill High School in the suburb of Aurora, and he was a pretty good point guard on the varsity team. He was always a competitor. But he was always the kind of competitor who could look in the mirror. As he hit his growth spurt before his junior year and was transitioned to shooting guard, he knew he was in the wrong sport.

“I could dribble and pass well, but I couldn’t score for s***,” he says.

Still, Colorado loves him. A buddy of his, Nathan McKinnon of the NHL’s Colorado Avalanche, got into training MMA through Sandhagen. In fact, if Sandhagen were to win the title on Oct. 4, he has an invitation to be the Avalanche’s honorary guest at their opening home game on Oct. 9. The whole world would change for Cory Sandhagen, at least for a little while.

And yet there is that word again. If he wins. But perhaps the word that distinguishes good fighters from great ones is how.

As in, how will he beat Merab? The MMA math doesn’t add up. Dvalishvili beat Umar Nurmagomedov earlier this year, while Sandhagen lost to Nurmagomedov just a few months earlier. Dvalishvili dominated the Russian Petr Yan in March 2023, while Sandhagen lost to Yan in 2021. It’s a story problem: If Merab has beat Nurmagomedov and Yan and Cory has lost to Nurmagomedov and Yan, how does Cory beat Merab?

That’s why he’s a 3-to-1 BetMGM underdog heading into the fight. The patterns aren’t on his side.

“It’s one of those things,” his coach, Trevor Wittman, says. “A lot of people go in with the wrong mentality. They go in with the mentality of I don’t want to get taken down. It becomes self-defense, and you’re now fighting not to win, you’re fighting not to get taken down.”

Wittman has known Sandhagen since he was a lanky 18-year-old kid, showing up at Nate Marquardt’s place, enamored with GLORY and K-1 kickboxing. He has been his primary coach since Sandhagen fought Nurmagomedov in 2024. He was with him through the masterclass performance against Figueiredo in Des Moines.

“I feel like everybody does that [with Merab], and the whole thing is you’ve got to put time and time and more time into that to be able to not do that,” Wittman says.

“But you’ve got to think offensively. If we’re going to go into this fight and face another wrestler, we have to be offensive-minded and we have to be willing to meet him and we have to be willing to offensively grapple with him. Not run. Not back up.”

Sandhagen is putting in the time and time and more time, going through the sequences he knows await him in Las Vegas. Merab doubled up Yan in strikes when they fought. He had 11 total takedowns, and amassed nearly seven minutes of control time. When Merab handed Nurmagomedov his first loss, he landed seven takedowns. He beat a Dagestani at a Dagestani’s game. He breaks people who had previously seemed unbreakable.

One time when I was pointing out these kinds of stats to former UFC fighter Chris Wilson, who was getting ready for a 2008 fight with Jon Fitch, “The Professor” raised his eyebrow at me, saying, “You act as though he’s invincible — what is he going to do, summon the winds?”

Nor does Sandhagen see an indestructible force in Merab.

“I think Merab is an extremely good fighter and I think he has a really good champion’s mind to him, but he is so far from being unbeatable,” he says. “To believe the headlines — that he’s unstoppable, 13 fight wins streak, pound-for-pound best bantamweight to ever live, all that — is insane to me.”

When Sandhagen steps back and sees himself fighting Merab — when he sees the body that inhabits his will doing the work — he sees Vegas parlays being ripped up.

“[Merab’s] not that,” he says. “He’s very good, but he’s not that.

“You have to do a lot more than what Merab has for me to think that I can’t beat you. I think that if O’Malley, who defends shots pretty good, knew how to get the f*** up off of his back better, that fight probably goes to O’Malley. In the same way, if Umar doesn’t get tired, I think that Umar probably wins that fight. So Merab wins in specific ways that we’re going to be ready for.”

Sandhagen has seen the rankings in which Merab sits in the top-five on the pound-for-pound lists. He knows the math, but his math deals in percentages.

“Merab is 1,000% beatable,” he says.

For a guy who got into MMA without any plans of becoming a champion or even competing professionally — “I just loved training,” he insists — Sandhagen has watched himself accomplish “a helluva lot.” Since we’re in the land of the «Sandman,» and dreams are such malleable things, I ask him how he wants things to play out in the next year.

“I want to beat Merab, then go on my little revenge tour,” Sandhagen says. “Beat Umar and Yan. Then I want to fight O’Malley. And that’s what I want my 2026 to look like.”

As somebody who is watching his own career reaching such high levels, he has no problem looking you in the eye as he relays this vision.

“If I beat Merab, my stock shoots through the roof immediately,” he says. “And then if I beat Umar and Yan, I still get to accomplish being one of the greatest of all time, which was one of my goals. I feel like being the champ is where your career actually starts.”

For Sandhagen, the goals came later. They came after Wittman asked him to write down what he wanted. A title was something he thought he should put down on that list, because that’s what people in the game pursue. The goals were built as he kept winning, but they were fine-tuned when he realized he didn’t like losing.

“It’s cool that I’ve had some hiccups along the way, and I still can potentially be the best at this s***,” he says. “If I win this belt, I get to be like, ‘Umar, you’re next; Yan, you’re next,’ and then get these guys back — these really phenomenal fighters — put my stamp on things. Then I can be like, nope, I went back and beat everyone else, look how much better I ended my career than how it started.”

From where he talks, on the beautiful Front Range of Colorado, if you were to take a train down to Silverton and backpack into the so-called Needle Mountains, you’d find more of the state’s beautiful 14ers. Some of them are more difficult than others, but Sandhagen has climbed a few.

It’s not that he’s an avid hiker, it’s just that he’s always liked the idea of standing on top of the world.