Brandon Mills always knew he wanted to be a fighter just like his dad.
Of course, growing up as the son of UFC Hall of Famer Matt Hughes may make it seem like it was easy for Mills to follow his dad into the family business, but that wasn’t exactly the case. Instead, Mills says his dad actually discouraged him from fighting, although Hughes also offered unwavering support to whatever his son decided to do with his life.
“Since day one he said, ‘I don’t want you to fight,’” Mills told MMA Fighting. “[He said,] ‘I’m never going to push you to fight, that’s for sure, but I’m not going to stop you, and if you go down that route, I will help you.’ So that’s pretty much the story of how he feels about it.
“Obviously he’d rather me do something else. But I always wanted to be a fighter, so he set me up right. He got me living at American Top Team, training with the best guys, but he would rather me be doing something else, which I understand. I have a daughter and I would never want her to go down this route either.”
Despite his own success as one of the greatest welterweights in MMA history, Hughes understands better than most just how difficult it can be to find success, especially at the highest levels of the sport.
When he started fighting in the UFC, Hughes still wasn’t making huge paychecks, much less earning life-changing money, so it wasn’t exactly the most stable career to choose. To add to that, Hughes knows the toll fighting can take on a person both physically and mentally, so it wasn’t a career he necessarily wanted for any of his children.
“I know the lows of this sport just as much as I know the highs,” Hughes told MMA Fighting. “I can’t imagine any father would actually want their child to become a cagefighter. Those that do, have obviously not lived the life. I think there are a lot better and smarter ways to earn a living. And actually being good enough in this sport to make a living out of it is very rare.
“So yes, I did not want Brandon to choose this path. It’s a tough life and you need thick skin. Not something I want to see my kid go through.”
For all the reservations Hughes had about his son fighting, Mills felt almost destined to compete in the same sport as his father.
After watching his dad defeat Georges St-Pierre as a toddler, Mills immediately declared that he wanted to do the same thing when he grew up, so his mother enrolled him in wrestling when he was 4 years old. Back then, Mills didn’t truly understand exactly what Hughes did for a living — at school, he often compared his dad to the biggest superstars in professional wrestling — but he quickly fell in love with the idea of doing the same thing.
Wrestling remained his primary focus until he was around 12, when Mills took a trip with his father to visit a family friend, and that changed everything for him.
“My dad took me out to Hawaii to visit B.J. Penn at one of his gyms that was opening,” Mills said. “So for half a week or a weekend, I was out there watching them do their thing, put on seminars and train, and that was my first time really seeing it, especially outside of just my dad.
“It was B.J. and other fighters, so that was probably the moment where I was like, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
Mills continued wrestling while simultaneously focusing on his schoolwork, but in the back of his mind, he was thinking about a future in fighting. In fact, he’d already begun adding new weapons to his arsenal to prepare for MMA when he was still just a teenager.
“The wrestling season would be, say, October to March, and then once wrestling season would stop, I would train MMA for about three months, primarily in jiu-jitsu, and then I would transition back to wrestling,” Mills said. “That was my routine until probably my senior year of high school, when I really started doing MMA during the summer.”
After his first year of college, during which he also wrestled, the itch to fight had to be scratched, so Mills decided it was now or never to turn his full attention towards MMA.
He turned to his dad again for advice, and this time Hughes knew there was no denying it — his son was going to become a fighter.
“If he wants it, I’m going to support it,” Hughes said. “And that’s why he’s been training at American Top Team. The best MMA gym in the world.”
Mills says his dad dropped him off at the Florida-based gym but didn’t go inside to make introductions or even attempt to influence anybody by telling the fighters and coaches that Matt Hughes’ son was training there now.
At the beginning, Mills was awestruck by the talent surrounding him, and he often ended his days beaten up, bloody and bruised, yet overjoyed that he’d just trained alongside fighters he grew up idolizing, with their posters on his walls when he was growing up.
And still, no one really knew the famous lineage he was carrying on at the gym.
“At the beginning, I was just the kid who got the living s*** beat out of him every single day,” Mills said with a laugh. “Just four or five months of getting killed every single day, and I always came in with a smile. I remember ‘King’ Mo [Lawal] said to me, ‘You’re getting your butt kicked every day, have a chip on your shoulder, why are you smiling every day?’ I’m like, ‘Coach, I’m getting my butt kicked by my heroes! I’m in the best spot in the world right now.’
“As soon as they started figuring out who my dad was, some guys were like, ‘Now we’re turning it up, we’re really going to beat your ass,’ and I needed that! Other guys were like, ‘We’re going to help him even more, we’re going to give him privates, we’re going to do everything after practice.’”
Keeping his head down and just concentrating on training and getting better was sound advice Mills followed from his dad.
“[I told him,] don’t ever say no to a coach,” Hughes said. “Listen to your corner. Don’t get cocky. Keep your mouth shut and work hard. I always said when I fought, ‘When you lose, say little; when you win, say less.’”
The lessons paid off. After an undefeated four-fight amateur career, Mills is set to become a full-fledged professional fighter on Saturday when he makes his official debut as part of the Caged Aggression card in Iowa. It’s also the same card where Hughes’ longtime coach Pat Miletich makes his return to action in the main event.
While he doesn’t share his father’s last name, Mills knows that he’ll hear about his dad often in the days leading up to his fight. Truth be told, Mills expects his father’s enormous shadow to loom large throughout his entire career, but he’s already learned to embrace it.
“I was blessed to have such a great family around me — and I still do — to prepare me for this,” Mills said. “Even when I was wrestling, because my dad was such a stud wrestler, I was getting compared to him. From a pretty young age, they were slowly preparing me, ‘This is going to happen. Interviews like this are going to happen. People are going to talk to you about your dad.’ Slowly, they just helped me prepare for it.
“Obviously now, there’s pressure with it, but I’m so much more mentally prepared for it and I’m not going to let stuff get under my skin. There’s people at the gym that just call me Matt Jr. [and] I get it. I’m prepared for the rest of my career to be compared to my dad and people only see me through my dad, which obviously I’d want them to see me, but I can’t shake who my dad is. I’m mentally prepared for it. I have no issues with it.”
As for Hughes, who celebrates his 50th birthday just one day before his son fights, he will be there Saturday front and center. He’s serving as one of Mills’ coaches and cornermen.
With 54 bouts on a résumé that includes multiple reigns as UFC champion, one may think Hughes has moved past getting nervous before fights — and perhaps that was true during his career. However, the same can’t be said as Hughes gets ready to watch his son compete this weekend.
“I was always more nervous cornering my teammates than I was for my own fights,” Hughes said. “I had the urge to jump in the cage and help them. I don’t like that helpless feeling when I have to sit on the sidelines and scream what to do.
“So guaranteed, I’ll be feeling the same thing when Brandon and Pat are fighting this weekend.”
While his dad might be sitting on pins and needles, Mills can barely contain his excitement as he prepares to turn professional and fight in front of all his friends and family.
“I’ve been waiting a long time to go pro in my home state, especially with Pat [Miletich] being the headliner, my dad in my corner, and B.J. Penn on commentary,” Mills said. “It’s all coming together. I couldn’t have planned it any better.”