Phumi Nkuta thought his career was over.
Following a win over Jason Eastman in Cage Fury FC back in 2021, the 28-year-old prospect, who trains alongside former UFC bantamweight champion Aljamain Sterling and top contender Merab Dvalishvili, dealt with a broken hand that required surgery and months of rehabilitation to recover. While the injury itself wasn’t all that uncommon, Nkuta revealed that the timing is what ultimately doomed him to announce his retirement from the sport.
“That hand injury, if I could show you a picture, it was very gruesome,” Nkuta told MMA Fighting. “I had to wait, like, two weeks to even get the surgery. So the hand healed improperly, so they had to re-break it and fix it. I was in a cast for almost four months. The fight was Dec. 17. I didn’t get out of the cast until, I think, March 10.
“I broke the first metacarpal completely. Snapped it. It wasn’t even connected to each other and I also pushed the knuckle all the way back [into my hand]. The problem was I couldn’t get the surgery until after the holidays with Christmas coming up, with New Year’s coming up the following weeks. So it started to heal wrong, it started to heal in its broken state. So that’s what caused the injury to take so long for the recovery.”
Nkuta spent several months in a cast without any use of his hand, and at that point, he was just ready to be done with his fighting career. Between the injury and difficulty finding quality opponents, it was almost like a sign that Nkuta needed to walk way from MMA.
“It took a very long while to even just make a proper fist,” he said. “I think maybe two months in, I could make a solid fist. The first four weeks, I couldn’t even move my hand. In order to keep the hand solid, they had to put six pins inside. Five going in through the side and one through the middle to keep it all in line.
“So my hand was completely immobilized for, like, four months, and then we had another four weeks of rehab. It was kind of crazy. It was a lot. I didn’t have use of my hand for a while.”
Once he was finally out of the cast and could move his hand again, Nkuta immediately started getting back into the gym because he still loved practicing martial arts, even if he wasn’t going to fight again.
It wasn’t until the summer of 2022 — nearly nine months after the injury occurred — that Nkuta was able to punch at full strength again. He still wasn’t ready to end his retirement, but he wanted to engage in MMA again just because he loved the sport so much.
“I was training a lot,” Nkuta said. “I had the pleasure of helping Aljo get ready for the [Henry] Cejudo fight and I’m a martial artist, so I train year-round anyways. I’m not the type of guy that likes to hop in there and do a camp and get into a fight. I’m always training.”
A few months after Sterling defeated Cejudo to defend his UFC title, Nkuta was still actively training but hadn’t considered a comeback until he got a call from his manager about a potential opportunity.
“[My manager] Oren [Hodak] called me, and I’m driving home from seeing my family and he goes, ‘Look, there’s this card in Nashville and Dana White might be there, I heard some people from the UFC might be there, so you should hop in there.’” Nkuta recounted. “Aljo had been on me about coming back. Merab [Dvalishvili] had been on me about coming back. [Matt Frevola] had been on me, the whole team, and it’s one of those things where I love martial arts but I don’t necessarily love the sport of MMA.
“I love competing. If you got no fame, no clout, or anything from this sport, I’d still be doing it anyway, whether I’m in that ring or I’m teaching. So I looked at that opportunity, I was in shape, I was sparring anyways and I thought, let me just hop back in there. Dana and Sean Shelby and Mick Maynard weren’t there, but we hopped in and we got a win over one of the highest-touted prospects at flyweight outside of the UFC. I don’t know if it was meant to be or maybe Oren was trying to trick me to come back, but either way, I’m back.”
On Friday night, Nkuta jumps up to bantamweight for his CFFC return when he clashes with Hunter Starner while attempting to keep his perfect record intact. At this stage, Nkuta is 100 percent committed to his MMA career again, and hopes that an organization like the UFC takes notice.
Of course, when Nkuta isn’t fighting, he’s also found another passion project — he has aspirations to make it as a professional wrestler.
Nkuta says that, like it or not, MMA and pro wrestling share a lot of similarities and characteristics that make it a natural fit for an athlete and somebody who holds the gift of gab. Deep down, Nkuta knows he possesses both, which is why a transition into pro wrestling just made sense to him.
Even before he made the decision to test himself in that world, Nkuta had already picked the brain of current WWE Superstar CM Punk, who previously called fights for CFFC in his spare time. Punk went the opposite route as Nkuta after he left professional wrestling and attempted to make it in MMA with two fights in the UFC.
It was during a broadcast that Nkuta turned to Punk for advice about getting on the microphone and cutting an authentic promo, which happens to work well in both MMA and pro wrestling.
“We were doing commentary at CFFC, they let me do commentary for the prelims and I just asked him on the side,” Nkuta said. “Obviously, I’m a talker, I’d already done an interview with him and I don’t really plan what I’m going to say but I knew the interview was good. So I was like, let me ask this guy CM Punk how to cut a promo.
“He just said, ‘Be yourself. If you’re faking it, you’re being something that you’re not, everybody is going to see it. It’s going to be fake, it’s not going to be organic.’ So I’m going to be myself.”
Taking away that lesson from Punk helped Nkuta not only start exploring a career in pro wrestling, but it also gave him the confidence to speak proudly about his plans for the future now that he’s back to fighting full-time.
“When you hear me say I’m one of the best fighters on the planet, that I’m the best flyweight in the world, that I’m the king of any ring, that I’m going to kill it pro wrestling, I’m going to kill it in the sport of MMA, it’s because I genuinely believe that,” Nkuta said. “I’m not over here putting on fake suits and put on a fake persona. I really live, eat, and breathe this.
“I’m all the way back. I’ve been back since I took that fight [in Nashville]. I’m in the gym sparring, I’m boxing every week, I’m wrestling every week. It’s like I never left at this point. I can’t wait to show what I’ve got.”