Uriah Hall prepared for UFC 249 despite uncomfortable path to event

The nasal swab entered Uriah Hall’s nostril and wiggled around inside his head in search of enough of a sample to test for the coronavirus.

“The whole time, I'm calm. I'm calm,” Hall said about that part of the UFC’s testing protocol ahead of Saturday’s UFC 249 event in Jacksonville, Florida. “They went all the way up there, and swabbing stuff and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s not so bad.’ Everyone's freaking out. It was just the fact that someone's going to shove some stuff up your nose. It wasn't so bad.”

And for a professional mixed martial arts fighter, an occupation filled with strikes to the head and body, a blip of soft material at the end of a thin stick getting jammed up the nose for a few seconds seems rather tame. But the circumstances surrounding the past two months as the country came to a halt to slow the spread of COVID-19 also played a part in Hall's demeanor during testing.

“I think that quarantine helped, the living in the gym and just being acclimated with that uncomfortable lifestyle,” said Hall, who grew up in Queens after emigrating from Jamaica. “I was like, 'Man, I live in a gym.' You think throwing a stick up my nose is going to mess with me right now?”

Hall trains at Fortis MMA in Dallas, Texas. A month ago, as he was training to face Ronaldo "Jacare" Souza in a middleweight bout originally scheduled for April 18 but with many strings attached to that date, he moved into his gym. He slept there, ate there, did his laundry there. It was his home before flying to Jacksonville on Wednesday.

Hall said he wanted to create a sense of uncomfortableness to help keep himself focused. Sleeping inside of a MMA gym certainly qualifies.

“There was noise every night,” Hall said. “I think there was a ghost in the attic.”

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UFC 249 originally was scheduled for Barclays Center in Brooklyn before Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo banned large gatherings in mid-March as New York became the epicenter for coronavirus cases and deaths. It later was rescheduled for the April 18 date at Tachi Palace, which is on Native American lands in Lemoore, California, and not subject to regulation by the California State Athletic Commission. That plan was canceled on April 9 when UFC president Dana White said his broadcast partners at ESPN and its parent company, Disney, asked him to "stand down.” On April 19, UFC announced that UFC 249 would take place on May 9 at the VyStar Veterans Memorial Arena in Jacksonville.

Not exactly an easy ebb-and-flow of training, dieting and mentally preparing. But through all of the starts and stops, Hall (15-9) remained on the card and ready to fight Souza (26-8).

“I've been up and down, I was happy, then unmotivated because it wasn't happening,” Hall said. “So I'm training and then I don't know when I'm going to fight, where I'm going to fight. And then the gyms close down, so now I’m like, 'All right, Rocky mode.' I'm running every day like Rocky. I'm throwing rocks and stuff. That's all I could have done.”

Amid the uncertainties, Hall made a few phone calls that helped set him straight and build up the confidence he needed to carry his two-fight win streak into the octagon to face Souza, a decorated Jiu-Jitsu world champion and former Strikeforce champion.

“I had to call my coach, call my mom, 'I don’t want to do this.' My coach was like, 'Bro, it's sucks you got to bite down, man. And the real one you will come out of it.' That's when I was like, 'You know what? I'm going to the gym.' I’m moving into the gym. Because every chapter in your life requires a new version.”

By Mark La Monica

mark.lamonica@newsday.comLaMonicaMark

Mark La Monica is a deputy sports editor at Newsday. He also covers mixed martial arts.