[ad_1]
The plan wasn’t necessarily to resign as a police officer for the City of Philadelphia.
“I tried putting in a leave of absence,” Chris Daukaus told The Post via Zoom on Monday. “The upper brass pretty much told me that I needed to pick a career and to stop playing around.
“So I said, ‘OK, no problem,’ ” he continued, with just the hint of a smile. “So, here I am, fighting for the UFC full-time.”
Daukaus’ official last day as a cop was Dec. 1, less than three weeks before he will compete in the first UFC headliner of his eight-year MMA career as he takes on former two-time heavyweight title challenger Derrick Lewis to cap the promotion’s final event of 2021, a UFC Fight Night (7 p.m. ET main card, ESPN+) emanating from UFC Apex in Las Vegas. He says it’s still “ingrained” in him that he’ll have to go to work in uniform as he adjusts to life after police work, but all he’s missed from that time is the people he worked with.
Nine years after graduating from the Philadelphia police academy, the son of a city police sergeant preferred not to identify strictly as his profession.
“I’m not wanting to be like, ‘I was a cop.’ I always hated that,” Daukaus said. “I didn’t like when people knew I was a cop. That’s just how I was. I just didn’t like it because, whether that was a preconceived notion of you, or whatever it was, I just didn’t like to be labeled.”
It was a career he seemed to have fallen into. Having only taken the test for the police academy because “my old man was on my back” while directionless at Penn State, he eventually graduated from the academy in 2012 and joined the force.
Daukaus loved the academy and getting to know his peers. He was “all in” on his police career in the early years, even to the detriment of his nascent MMA career. Eventually, however, it didn’t sit well with the competitive former multisport athlete, who played plenty of soccer and lacrosse growing up, that he was underachieving in the cage.
“My record showed [that] I kind of let training take a back seat to everything,” Daukaus said. “I was 2-2 as a pro when I should have been better than that. And then I just said, ‘I really don’t want to be a cop for the rest of my life, so let me really focus on fighting.’ ”
The shift in priorities and long-term goals has worked out swimmingly for the 32-year-old, who trains out of Martinez Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in Philadelphia. Daukaus (12-3, 11 finishes) proceeded to win 10 of his next 11 fights, including a perfect 4-0 mark since the UFC signed him last summer.
The rise of Daukaus from prospect to bona fide top-10 heavyweight came rapidly. His heavy hands have finished all four of his UFC opponents, with Shamil Abdurakhimov the latest victim. At least that foe from Sept. 25 made it out of the first round; the first three can’t say the same.
Such success in the cage, coupled with wife Kelly’s preference for Daukaus “to pick one career to be more at home” with her and their 2-year-old son Cooper, swayed him to jump into fighting as his one and only professional pursuit.
“Once I got signed to the UFC, I kind of was like, ‘OK, this is probably a possibility that I can leave the job,’ ” Daukaus says of police work. “And then once I started getting the wins, I was like, ‘OK, this is definitely a possibility of me leaving the job.’ ”
And so it came to pass. Daukaus, whose younger brother Kyle is a UFC middleweight who also debuted for the promotion last summer, finds himself entering the year-ending bout against Lewis (25-8, 21 finishes) with, perhaps, a path to a UFC title shot in 2022. Lewis is coming off an unsuccessful bid to win the interim heavyweight title against Ciryl Gane, who will face champion Francis Ngannou in a unification bout next month.
A victory against Lewis, the UFC’s heavyweight KO king with 12 in his 16 victories with the promotion, would place him firmly in the upper crust of the division. In the UFC’s proprietary rankings, only former champ Stipe Miocic sits between Lewis and the two champions. Curtis Blaydes, Alexander Volkov and Jairzinho Rozenstruik are ranked between Lewis and Daukaus, although the Philly product would stand to leapfrog them with a win. Embattled former light heavyweight champion Jon Jones, who has been working toward a move to heavyweight for more than a year, is a wild card as well.
Daukaus seems resigned to the fact that he will need to win one more fight before the UFC would offer him a shot at gold. He’d love to book a date against Miocic, but he suggests “Stipe might tell me to go kick rocks, that he’s waiting on the winner of January.”
Admitting he isn’t sure what the UFC has in store for him, he’ll allow the chips to fall where they may if he can get through Lewis this weekend.
“I’ll make my callout if I feel it’s warranted,” Daukaus said, “and then we’ll go from there.”
[ad_2]