Jim Miller has never really had a nickname. A few years ago, after hearing from fans time and again that he needed one, he tried to adopt “A-10” as a handle, after the heavily fortified, nearly indestructible aircraft designed specifically to endure battle. It was no good. Jim “A-10” Miller just didn’t fly. So Jim Miller has always been just “Jim Miller.” As in the full name. He’s never referred to as just “Miller,” “Jim,” or “Jimbo.” When people talk about Jim Miller, they say, “Jim Miller.”
Lately, however, Jim Miller has wanted a nickname. In fact, he wants the only nickname that makes sense for a guy who is 40 years old and—somehow, after 15 years competing in the UFC against every stripe of monster and contender—still making the walk. For the past decade or so, when people refer to Jim Miller, they commonly say Jim fucking Miller. There’s an emphasis on the fucking to convey proper astonishment. When he beat Gabriel Benitez with a face crank in January, thus ensuring that he would compete on the pay-per-view gala affair of the year—this weekend’s UFC 300—the words “Jim fucking Miller” were tweeted out about a million times.
The fucking emphasizes Miller’s blue-collar brand of badassery. His impossible perseverance in a league where most fighters fade and burn within a few fights, because of age, injuries, pressure, or scrutiny. It’s meant to remind you that every time people count him out, Jim Miller shows up—just as pedestrian as you please, sometimes with next to zero fanfare—and beats some younger guy hell-bent on ending his career. That fucking means to tell you, with an extra emphasis on disbelief, that he simply won’t die.
Jim Miller has heard all of this. That’s why he wants to be announced as Jim “Fucking” Miller when Bruce Buffer introduces him at UFC 300.
It’s hard to argue with a guy who will be competing for the 44th time on Saturday night, which is a UFC record. Jim Miller will face Bobby Green during the UFC 300 prelims on Saturday in Las Vegas, a full 15 and a half years since traveling to Birmingham, England, to take on the Frenchman David Baron in his debut. Today, the largely forgotten Baron is 51 years old and hasn’t competed in a decade.
Meanwhile, Jim Miller fights on.
At times, he does so almost anonymously, in front of dozens of people at the UFC Apex on random Fight Nights; at other times, like this weekend, as an unsung legend of the sport. He’s the only fighter who will be able to say he fought at UFC 100, UFC 200, and UFC 300, which is a feat within itself. Between those milestone events lie nearly 15 grueling years. Of the 22 fighters on UFC 100 back in 2009, only two others are still active—Alan Belcher, who popped up last year on the bare-knuckle boxing circuit, and the GOAT Jon Jones, who fights only once in a great while.
Most are long gone. Three have already been inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame; one, Stephan Bonnar, is dead.
“I was still only 25 for UFC 100, a young fighter,” Miller tells The Ringer, remembering that first big event. “I was sharing the card with Brock [Lesnar] and [Frank] Mir and GSP and Hendo [Dan Henderson]. It was like, a ton of names, and for me it was awesome.”
Miller didn’t just beat the former Ultimate Fighter winner Mac Danzig that night; he turned the UFC 100 cage into a bloody crime scene. When the main card started, “people were wondering why they went with the red canvas,” as Miller puts it. That’s because he had spilled Danzig’s blood all over the cage during the prelims, turning it into a gruesome palimpsest of sorts to his savage encounter. These days, the UFC would paint over the blood pools before the main card. But back then? Fighters danced barefoot over the spatter, bathing in the violence of their occupation.
“I went out and I performed well that night, and, hey—I was able to leave my mark with his blood!” Miller laughs.
That was the first big highlight of his career, but Miller’s status as a cult hero in MMA becomes Bunyanesque when you run a magnifying glass over the subsequent years. Start with the fact that he has never backed out of a fight, an astounding asterisk when you consider that cards are rearranged on a weekly basis with so many injuries during training. The closest he ever came was when he was removed from a card in September 2021 against Nikolas Motta upon testing positive for COVID during fight week. That wasn’t Miller backing out of a fight; he was forced from the card against his will.
Besides, Miller ended up fighting four weeks later against Erick Gonzales before getting rebooked against Motta in his next fight, which Miller won via second-round TKO. As a DIY woodsman from Whippany, New Jersey, whose dream in life is to “drop off the grid” when his career is over—to raise his farm animals on his modest green acreage, make his own beer, and learn to live off the land in the most simplistic way possible—Miller just shows up to every fight with the same idea in mind: to put the other guy through 15 minutes of hell. That’s it.
“The goal has always been from the beginning, I want to make it a Jim Miller fight,” he says. “I want somebody to fight to my strengths, and I knew from the start if they fight to my strengths that I’m going to have an advantage. That was the goal even going back to my UFC debut. I was going to push the pace, create scrambles and look to capitalize when I get ahead.”
What is a trademark Jim Miller fight? It’s usually a fast-paced, pressure-filled frenzy with plenty of chaotic action. It’s a blur of mullets, perp-like mustaches, and red beards, depending on Miller’s particular look at the moment. It shouldn’t be sustainable for 43 high-caliber fights, but somehow, some way, he’s made it work. He’s built like a compressed accordion, usually cutting around 35 pounds to reach the 155-pound lightweight limit. And through his first 43 UFC fights, he’s seen it all. He’s stood in against a thousand blows and returned thousands more.
Think about all Miller’s been through. He has appeared on 20 pay-per-view cards and one Fight for the Troops event at the Cumberland County Crown Coliseum in Fayetteville, North Carolina. He’s fought at the UFC Apex buried on the prelims and as a headliner three times on Fight Nights. There have been losses. Seventeen in all, with an 18th being converted to a no-contest when Pat Healy’s drug test came back with undeniable traces of—get this—marijuana. Miller also has 26 total victories in the UFC, including a dozen submission finishes and six knockouts. The man who has the most submissions in UFC history—Charles Oliveira—ended up tapping against Miller, who caught him in a rare kneebar. With Oliveira sitting among the top pound-for-pound fighters in the world heading into his own big bout at UFC 300 against Arman Tsarukyan, that one has aged extremely well for Miller.
As for end-of-the-night bonuses, Miller has a grand total of 15, netting him close to $1 million just for being more thrilling than most competitors. Miller has never been in a title fight, which is just as unlikely as anything else in his career; he’s never had surgery, and up until his recent fight with Jesse Butler, he’d never even broken a bone. He fractured his thumb on the second punch he landed in that fight, moments before Butler crumpled on the fence, divested of his wits. That fight lasted only 23 seconds.
The UFC’s sturdiest fighter has fought through every down moment in MMA. He’s fought through Lyme disease, walking pneumonia for his first fight with Oliveira, and a wicked series of shoulder injuries, most notably before his first memorable fight with Joe Lauzon. He fought Nate Diaz with a torn muscle in his calf, an injury he suffered midway through the first round. A podiatrist told him the injury wasn’t something you see with young athletes, but in “55-year-old women who fall down the stairs.”
He wore that as a badge of honor, just like he does his incredible five-year battle with Lyme, which nearly forced him to retire at the second milestone of UFC 200 in 2016.
“It was a very hard time leading up to that one,” he says. “When I was fighting on UFC 196 [against Diego Sanchez], I had decided I was going to ask to fight on UFC 200 so I could retire at that event. I felt like my body wasn’t there anymore. I was like, I’ve been a professional fighter for 10 years, and I’m banged up.”
Little did he know that he had Lyme disease, which for two full years leading up to his eventual diagnosis a couple of days before UFC 196 was sapping him of energy, attacking his equilibrium and joints, and ultimately affecting his nervous system. Miller calls this the “second act” of his career. It got to the point where he could barely train, and he was ready to throw in the towel after losing four of five fights.
“When you’re functioning at 20 percent, and you get to 30 percent, 40 percent, you feel like you’ve doubled,” Miller says. “You feel like you’ve gone up, but you haven’t—you’re not there yet. Not back.”
That’s how he felt as he started treatment before UFC 200, where he was to face the “Fireball Kid,” the Japanese legend Takanori Gomi. It was a fight that he’d wanted for a long time—“I mean, when I started fighting on the local circuit in New Jersey, he was the no. 1 lightweight on the planet—he was the guy,” Miller says—and yet now that he had it, he was a compromised version of himself.
What did Miller do? He knocked Gomi out in the first round on the commemorative gold canvas of UFC 200. There would be no retirement after all. Miller went on to win a few more fights as he got the Lyme under control, before he noticed the symptoms coming back after his UFC 205 fight at Madison Square Garden against Thiago Alves. The battle against Lyme raged on as he lost four straight matches over a 14-month period, a spiral from relevance that left Miller on the outside looking in.
By 2018, on the verge of turning 35, Miller looked done. There would be no third act.
Only, this is Jim fucking Miller we’re talking about. Of course there was a third act: one of the most unlikely in UFC history. Overcoming Lyme is just another thing that Miller did, the same way he’s overcome everything. He turned it around that same year against Alex White, very quietly winning the fight in Dallas to keep his roster spot in the UFC. Though he has lost some fights, nobody expected him to go 9-5 since turning 35. Nobody expected him to win five of his last six via stoppage. Nobody expected Miller to make it to UFC 300, a goal that began as a kind of far-fetched dangling carrot a couple of years back, nothing more than a novelty to help motivate him through training.
Yet Miller made it. He took out Donald “Cowboy” Cerrone in a welterweight “battle of the OGs” bout. He starched Butler in 23 seconds. Then he beat Benitez in a fight everyone advised him not to take for fear that it might compromise his chance to fight at UFC 300. As he rolls along through his fourth act—as the UFC’s most unlikely redemption story—it’s easy to understand why he’s the UFC’s unsung hero. He quietly keeps dragging everyone into a Jim Miller fight, and no matter what—whether he’s fighting on the prelims or the main event, whether it’s against an anonymous fighter or a brand name, he never complains. He never lets his ego get involved. And he always shows up.
“Who knows what the grand finale’s going to be,” he says, saying that it might happen at UFC 300 against Bobby Green. “I was born to fight. It’s kind of clear at this point—I was kind of born to do this shit.”
That’s also hard to argue with. I remember asking the late Anthony Bourdain who his favorite fighter at a UFC event was around the time of Miller’s four-fight skid and battle with Lyme. Without thinking about it even for a second, he said, “Jim fucking Miller,” as if there could be no debate. Not Jim Miller. He added the intensifier.
With his fight airing on ESPN during the prelims on Saturday night, it’s been said that Bruce Buffer won’t introduce Miller the way he wants to be introduced—that they don’t want to bleep Buffer out during the introductions. But for a guy who has done so much for the UFC and never made a scene, there’s only one way to commemorate him the right way.
That is, call him exactly who he is: Jim “Fucking” Miller.
Chuck Mindenhall writes about combat sports without bias, and sometimes about his Denver teams with extreme bias. He cohosts The Ringer MMA Show on Spotify.