“It’s not a two-week notice, it’s a two-day notice,” he laughs. “That’s the kind of notice I’m giving when I go out there and fight. My bosses know if I go out there and I get a performance bonus, man, that last day I was at work was my last day at work. And they’re rooting for me. They want to see me win, they want to see me succeed. All of them know if they have a way out of the trade, they’ll take it. Nobody wants to carry a lunchbox the rest of their life.”
Putting that day job aside is the dream, and the 30-year-old from Augusta, Georgia, is closing in on it after earning a UFC contract last summer with a first-round knockout of Adam Bramhald. The win lifted Wellmaker’s perfect pro record to 8-0 with six finishes, and finally, the world got to see what those on the regional scene have been raving about for the last couple years.
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Raves don’t pay the bills, though, so Wellmaker has had to keep working as a pipefitter. It’s not a bad gig at all, but it is tiring to do that and try to put together a fight career at the same time.
“To be honest, the more recent years have been easier because I’ve started to see some actual progress and some real results and get bigger opportunities,” said Wellmaker. “But I was in the apprenticeship before I ever even started training. I got introduced to MMA through one of the guys I met during the apprenticeship. And so I never even knew what it was like to train without having to juggle a full-time job with school two nights a week and then a couple Saturday classes every semester. So, in the beginning when I was taking trips, I even remember taking trips to Virginia and all these other places for amateur fights and, at the end, coming back at a loss because we’re not getting paid.
