There’s a running joke between UFC heavyweight champion Stipe Miocic and his longtime head coach Marcus Marinelli. It’s been going on for a few years now, ever since Miocic first won the heavyweight title with a first-round knockout of Fabricio Werdum in 2016. The way it always starts is with Marinelli looking over at this 6-foot-4, 230-pound human wrecking machine and asking a simple question.

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“I’ll go, ‘Stipe, is it true you’re heavyweight champion?’” Marinelli said. “And he’ll just kind of look back at me and go, ‘Yeah, can you believe that?’”

Funny, at least for them. In part because, the way this team works, it would be pretty easy to forget that the big firefighter squeezing in workouts at the Strong Style MMA and Training Center in Independence, Ohio, is actually one of the top athletes in one of the world’s toughest sports.

In fact, he might even be the greatest heavyweight in MMA history, a title he could cement with another victory over former champ Daniel Cormier in their rubber match at UFC 252 in Las Vegas on Saturday.

You normally hear the words “heavyweight champion” and your mind conjures certain images of glamour and arrogance. Surely, the baddest man on the planet has an entourage and a fleet of luxury cars, plus maybe an exotic pet or two. At the very least, he must train at an elite facility with a team of expert coaches devoted to nothing but his training, right?

Or, if you’re Miocic, you’ve got your buddies holding pads for you when they get off work at their real jobs.

For instance, Miocic’s boxing coach? That would be Alex Cooper, who works as a commercial banker when he’s not in the gym drilling punch combos with the heavyweight champ. And his coach for grappling and jiu-jitsu? That’s Cleveland Municipal Court Magistrate judge Pablo Castro, a former Cuyahoga County prosecutor with a college wrestling pedigree. This is how it’s always been, for Miocic’s entire pro career. This is how they like it.

One nice thing about having a coaching staff full of working stiffs is they have an easy time finding one another. According to Cooper, he was recruited to Strong Style by Miocic’s former boxing coach, Joe Delguyd, who’s also a longtime Cleveland-area attorney.

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“We’d be at these amateur boxing events and we’re the only ones in suits because we both came straight from work,” said Cooper. “The two guys in suits are bound to end up talking to each other, and we just became friends.”

Other fight gyms might have more well-known names in the corner, but Miocic’s team is a unit that’s remained mostly unchanged since he first began his MMA journey a decade ago. It’s a team that, according to its members, would be hanging out as friends and martial arts enthusiasts even if they weren’t all involved in trying to retain a UFC heavyweight title.

“We beat each other up, but we’re also happy just to kick back and have a drink together,” said the jiu-jitsu black belt Castro. “Stipe and Marcus and a few of the other guys, they came to my mom’s funeral. That’s driving two, three hours just to pay their respects and go back. So it’s more of a family than it is just a group where we’ve pulled in people from here or there to try to make a championship team. We sort of naturally came together.”

Marinelli started out in the sport back in the mid-90s, before the term “mixed martial arts” had even been coined. Back then it was “shootfighting,” or “no-holds-barred,” and initially Marinelli’s goals were simply to refine techniques with other likeminded martial arts nerds.

Over time that grew into the Strong Style team, though it never became one of the MMA super-gyms that attracted high-profile talent from all over the country.

“We kept a low profile because we wanted a gym that’s not about the coaches – it’s about the fighters,” said Marinelli. “I’m one of those guys where, I know my place. I’m here to coach, so I stick to that. I’m not here for fame or anything like that. And when I’m working with Stipe, he’s not just a fighter to me. He’s become one of my best friends.”

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Miocic first walked through the doors as a sparring partner for Dan Bobish, a heavyweight who fought in early UFC and PRIDE Fighting Championships events back when the sport was still clawing its way toward the modern era. Bobish was a big guy with plenty of power, but he needed big bodies to train with – preferably ones that could help him sharpen his wrestling.

A big guy like Miocic, who had wrestled and played baseball at Cleveland State University, seemed like the perfect fit to Marinelli.

“I’d never met him before, but it didn’t take long to realize, this guy’s pretty impressive,” Marinelli said. “He helped Dan out and then I threw the pads on and told him what punches to throw. Right away it was like, holy shit, this is pretty impressive for his first day in here.”

But Miocic wasn’t interested in rushing into a pro fighting career back then. Months went by when Marinelli didn’t see him at all, he said. When he did show up again, it was just to work out, stay in shape, and keep his skills sharp once his college wrestling days were in the rearview mirror. He started out in MMA, but Miocic soon found that he really enjoyed boxing. So fine, Marinelli said, they’d lean into that.

Almost before they knew it, Miocic had won the 2009 Cleveland Golden Gloves tournament as a super heavyweight, and advanced to the quarterfinals at the national tournament.

“His ability to absorb new information, process it, and then put it to work on the floor or in the cage, it was just super fast right off the bat,” Marinelli said. “And one day he just sort of looked at me and said, ‘OK, I’m ready to do MMA again.’ So then we started to get serious about MMA. But that time he spent boxing really paid dividends, and I don’t know a whole lot of fighters who would do that, just start over in a new sport where they’re a beginner having to learn everything and work their way through.”

Miocic made his pro debut in 2010, and debuted in the UFC the following year. But as his career progressed rapidly, he remained adamant about keeping a few key things the same. One was his job as a firefighter-paramedic in Cleveland. The other was sticking with his coaches at Strong Style.

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But as the final bout of his trilogy with Cormier nears, it’s hard not to notice the difference in attention paid to the two fighters’ home gyms. At the American Kickboxing Academy gym in San Jose, Ca., Cormier trains with fellow former UFC champions like Cain Velasquez and Luke Rockhold. The coaching staff surrounding him has produced multiple champions in top MMA organizations, and most of those coaches aren’t rushing to the gym from their full-time banking jobs in order to make it to his training sessions.

But then, as coaches like the jiu-jitsu specialist Castro are quick to point out, the fact that he hasn’t let the heavyweight title change who he is might be a part of the reason why Miocic held it longer than anyone else.

“I think you find out about yourself when you’re dealing with success or when you’re in a top position like that,” said Castro. “Does it get to your head? Do you start thinking you’re better than other people because of it? Stipe, he appreciates what he has, but that humility and that work ethic, that’s a core part of who he is. It’s harder for something like (the heavyweight title) to mess with your head when you’re a person that deeply rooted in the foundation of your family and friends and your duties in your community.”

For fans, that laconic humility of Miocic sometimes comes across as plain old boring, the lack of a personality. But the person his coaches see is a different guy, according to the boxing coach Cooper.

While there’s no doubt that Marinelli is the boss – “you do things his way,” said Cooper, “and you can’t really argue with him,” – they’re all friends before anything else, to the point that their wives sometimes poke fun at them for spending hours in the gym together only to call each other on the phone during the ride home, just to keep the fun going.

“I remember we went over to Stipe’s house to watch it when (UFC women’s bantamweight champion) Amanda Nunes fought Ronda Rousey (at UFC 207),” Cooper said, “and we’re just sitting there joking, talking, having a good time. And it kind of hit me, we’re just hanging out and having an awesome time with the heavyweight champ of the world. Like, how did we get here? Just regular guys who get to be a part of this. But Stipe being Stipe, you wouldn’t know that about him if you didn’t already know.”

Marinelli’s had his own moments like this. Being there when Miocic first won the title in Brazil, with an arena full of fans yelling in Portuguese, “uh vai morrer” or “you’re going to die.” Rallying his fighter between rounds to prod him into knocking Cormier out to regain the title in the rematch. Maybe best of all, being there when Miocic broke the record for consecutive heavyweight title defenses with a win over Francis Ngannou, after which Miocic insisted that Marinelli – not UFC President Dana White, as is traditional – put the belt around his waist.

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As Miocic explained it at the post-fight press conference: “That’s my guy. I respect him and he respects me. End of story.”

“Thank God it was velcro,” Marinelli chuckled. “I was scared I’d drop it in front of everybody. But it really meant a lot. It was an emotional time. Fighting Ngannou, he’s a killer and Stipe fought literally a perfect fight. We had a pretty intricate plan and he executed it perfectly. We’re going to need another one of those out of him against (Cormier).”

If he gets it, and if Miocic beats Cormier for a second time to retain the title, then you can pretty much end any further debate about who the greatest heavyweight in UFC history is. It’ll be Miocic, without a doubt, the guy who walked in as a sparring partner and walked out an all-time great. All he needed was a little help from his friends.

(Top photo: Mike Roach/Zuffa LLC/Zuffa LLC via Getty Images)

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