Welcome to the CME blog’s newest feature – This Fucking Guy – where we take a long, hard look at an individual figure in the world of MMA and ask ourselves: This fucking guy (or girl), what’s their deal? Today, we examine Italian enigma Marvin Vettori ahead of what’s looking like it’ll be a crazy catchweight fight against Paulo Costa in Saturday’s UFC Fight Night headliner.
Angry hotel guest. Fashion icon. Occasional bald guy. “Mad” Marvin Vettori is many things. For a hot minute there, he was even a UFC middleweight title contender. Then he lost to Israel Adesanya for a second time in as many fights (though he doesn’t think he really lost either of those), and now he’s back to the drawing board for what’s shaping up to be an interesting fight in the UFC’s weirdsmobile division.
But this guy, what’s his fucking deal? Let’s start with what we know about him. The most obvious thing, of course, is that he doesn’t seem like one of those people who keep their feelings all bottled up. If you’re friends with Marvin and he gets all quiet while the two of you are driving to Target to look at Lego sets on a Saturday afternoon, you’re not going to have to ask if he’s mad at you. If he’s mad? Chances are you’ll know. You’ll know because he’ll be standing two inches from your nose gesturing and shouting in a mix of English and Italian.
That was a lot of people’s introduction to Vettori, back when he lost every last bit of his shit on Karl Roberson in a Jacksonville hotel in the early days of pandemic UFC. In fairness to him, the fight had been booked and cancelled and rescheduled a couple times already, and then Roberson missed weight and got pulled from the fight due to medical issues stemming from his weight cut. In other words, the way Vettori saw it, this guy was jerking him around. And he was not. Fucking. Having. It. Bro.
A couple things about this video. For one, all these people standing around this hotel lobby, gawking and filming as Vettori freaks out, and no one thought to help the poor son of a bitch in the black suit who’s trying to use his body as a human shield? But also, does anyone else get the sense that maybe this was not the first time Vettori had ever found himself standing around in public and begging someone to fight him? He just seems so … comfortable with the whole concept.
But Vettori is more than just a human volcano of emotion. For instance, did you know he has his own “streetwear clothing brand,” called Italian Dream Apparel? It is mostly T-shirts. And yet! Come fight week, you can’t help but get the sense that this guy has some strong opinions on fashion, even if many of them are wrong.
For instance, is it really a true pre-fight sitdown with “Mad” Marvin if he doesn’t wear a dope tracksuit that looks like something you’d see in the background of “New Jack City?”
And don’t even get me started on Press Conference Marvin. He showed up ready to fight for the UFC title looking like a goddamn Spiderman villain. That’s right in the faces of all these people who roll in there in a button-down shirt and actually think they’ve done something.
Plus, who else but a true Italian fashion icon would dare to make the boldest possible sartorial choice – wearing his Venum trunks backwards?
(Okay, jokes aside, can we admit that the UFC staff did Marvin dirty there? We got him in there taking promo pictures, all these lights and expensive cameras and what not, and couldn’t nobody speak up to say, ‘Bro they go the other way’? C’mon, you guys.)
In terms of his social media presence, Vettori is more of an Instagram kind of guy. (His Gram also shows how brave you have to be to post a picture of your mom if you’re a famous pro fighter with a public account.)
He is an outspoken yet infrequent tweeter. He seems to mostly get on there for fight nights, when he is prone to talk all sorts of shit in short, terse bursts. (“Till for real come by we can do some wrestling,” he tweeted as Darren Till was getting worked by Derek Brunson. This followed a series of facepalm emojis, natch.) He also got into it with Paul Felder recently after tweeting that he had to mute the commentary because Felder was, in his view, the “worst to ever do it.” Felder clapped back, using his superior command of the English language, and even this week Vettori was walking around talking about how he was eager to sort this out “face to face” with Felder in the pre-fight meetings.
“Paul Felder tried to be the smart kid in the comments when he replied to me,” Vettori said this week. “I didn’t really like that. It’s not that I didn’t like it, it’s just coming from him, it’s not like it really made sense but he tried to be funny. I addressed the thing that was important to me.”
Marvin, you literally started it. You tried to talk shit about him on Twitter, which as we all know is the internet’s comment section. And you can’t really say he’s fucking up by offering his opinion on the fight when that is what he is paid to do. It’s actually his job, my guy.
But see, that’s Vettori for you. He seems to be a full-tilt kind of dude. All the time. He also seems sort of myopic about it, in the sense that he doesn’t understand any other way to be. When people ask him about being the angry guy, he typically tries to laugh it off. As if he’s saying, hey I have other facets to my personality! Which is understandable. But you don’t get the sense that he often thinks he’s been wrong in too many situations (the Felder thing, for example, or the decisions he definitely lost but still sort of thinks he won). Vettori does not appear to struggle with self-belief in any sense. He decides quickly, latches onto a certain position, and refuses to budge an inch.
That’s a trait that also helps him in this world, since it’s one where you’d better commit all the way or not at all. And honestly? He seems to genuinely love the shit out of fighting in all its forms. This is a guy who grew up in Trento, Italy, not exactly known as a hotbed of martial arts. But still he managed to cobble together some semblance of a mixed martial arts education by training at five or six different gyms at once, even when it meant taking trains all over the damn place to get that work in.
As he said in one of those UFC.com pre-fight puff pieces, he’s been about this life since he was a teenager and first saw Fedor Emelianenko on video, which is when he decided to become a fighter.
“I remember at 4 p.m., my friends would hang around, do whatever normal kids would do,” Vettori said. “But for me, I would come back from school, eat, rest for a moment and go, and I wouldn’t be back until 11 p.m. at night to go to sleep.”
Vettori would later move to London just to continue his training, which was a pretty big deal for a kid who’d never lived outside of Italy and didn’t really have any serious Italian MMA role models he could look to as a blueprint for success. He just believed that he could make it in this world, then he put in the work and went after it. So, you know, respect.
And when you see him blow his fucking stack over any and everything, you gotta be a little grateful he found this productive means of channeling that energy. Otherwise you might run into him at a Marriott continental breakfast one day when you just used the last packet of strawberry jam, and he might not be so understanding.
So there you go. This fucking guy? That’s his deal.
