Greg Foster earned a UFC contract on the season finale of Dana White’s Contender Series, and instead of celebrating at the Meta APEX he was hustled straight into a waiting ambulance. The 34-year-old went three grinding rounds with Jason Asher, took a unanimous decision and became one of four fighters signed that night. He was the only one of the four who didn’t get a proper victory lap.
He didn’t go quietly, either. Foster told MMA Fighting’s José Youngs that he wanted to keep the energy going for the crowd and pushed back hard on the medical staff.
“The doctors were getting mad at me in the back,” Foster said. “I was trying not to go to the hospital, but they wouldn’t do it.”
That ride left two members of the Foster family hospitalized at the same time. Before the opportunity became official, his mother was in a car accident, and Foster rushed down to Tucson to be with her. The injury list is brutal. “She fractured her neck, her pelvis, eight broken ribs, collapsed lung, so we didn’t really know if she was going to make it,” he said. She went into neck surgery, spent two weeks in the ICU and has been in rehab since. Foster said he had to leave her bedside to go back to camp without knowing whether the fight would even happen, and once the call came he barely saw her for close to three weeks.
The win landed on her birthday. So the first thing Foster did once he could get to his phone in the ambulance was call her. “It was the first thing on my mind to call mom when we got in the ambulance, I could get on my phone,” he said. She was thrilled, by his account.
Foster (9-1) knew exactly what kind of fight he needed against Asher. He went in planning to pressure and drag Asher into a scrap, because he understood what Dana White and the UFC look for in a Contender Series bout. “So I was going to go in there and give them that fcking fight and just be undeniable,” he said. He also leaned into the age question rather than ducking it: “I’m different than another 34-year-old dude that has 30, 40 fcking fights.”
Next for Foster is a UFC debut, date and opponent still to come. He fought Asher at 155 pounds because the notice was shorter than usual, and he plans to drop back to featherweight for his Octagon debut. He says he’s been training for 16 years, has never been knocked out and has never been dropped in the gym. “At the end of the day, you’re going to have to kill me,” he said, while also insisting he has a clean, fake-heavy, calculated striking game that the Asher fight didn’t call for.
My take: winning a decision on the Contender Series and still walking away with a contract is hard, and doing it up a weight class, on short notice, with your mom in rehab two states of mind away from the cage is harder. Foster read the room perfectly and built a fight Dana couldn’t say no to. I want to see the version of him that gets a full camp at 145, with his mother watching from her couch instead of a hospital bed.
