Chuck Mindenhall Uncrowned Fri, November 6, 2026 at 4:03 AM UTC · 10 min read About Our Ads Advertisement Advertisement Advertisement When you ask Tony Laramie what he was up to a couple of short years ago, he runs a hand through his floppy Canadian mullet and sighs. What was it exactly? What was so bad that his own brother, former UFC fighter TJ Laramie, kept his distance from his younger sibling?
"I was being a scumbag," Laramie says, "I'd have stayed away from me, too."
Was it drinking? Drugs? Carousing? Causing general disturbances? Was he out there committing petty crimes on larks, while trying to hold down a career in MMA?
"Let's just say all of above," he says. "All of the above."
That was all at some misty point in 2023, perhaps even drifting into 2024 or maybe even 2025. It all began far earlier than that. It's a blur of sorts, so the timelines disappear at certain junctures. It was mostly before he got to Rizin, anyway, before he got serious about his MMA career. That's why his story is somewhat remarkable, because this weekend Laramie is back in Japan, where on Sunday — Saturday night for us in the States — he will fight at Rizin 55 for the flyweight title in Funabishi.
He will take on Makoto Takahashi for the 125-pound belt, having sprung up from the literal gutter.
And that is the functioning triumph for the 27-year-old Tony Laramie. That in the world's cruelest game, in a life headed for nowhere, he has somehow found his way forward. A path to redemption after a million "poor choices," to go along with a measure of salvation after a childhood that ended long before his teen years.
Fighting has been the one thing that has cared for him.
"Honestly, it was just with my poor upbringing and stuff like that, it was like I never really had … let's say the closest family I had I found through the gym," he says. "And then on top of that, when I fell off the rails a bit, when I got a little older, it brought me back to not being such a f***ing loser because it gave me a reason to do better too, as well.
"So I feel like fighting saved me in my younger years from living a life of no f***ing family or friends or anything like that. And then it saved me as I got older, as I started making poor choices, because it made me stop doing those poor choices to pursue this sport to the fullest."
Tony Laramie has spent much of his life fighting his demons. Now, with a Rizin flyweight title on the line, his focus is on the man across the cage. (Photo courtesy Rizin)
Those choices were both a product and a reaction to what he knew to be his life. Within a short period of time when he was 6 years old, we're talking within a couple of months , he lost his older brother, he lost his mother, and he watched his father go away to prison. Laramie was forced to move in with his aunt while barely out of kindergarten. The structure he knew of life crumbled before he understood what structure even was.
"It started with pretty much just drugs and crime, but and mainly drugs," he says of his family and his upbringing in Ontario. "And usually drugs lead to crime, you know what I mean? And then it's just a downhill spiral. I feel like my brother dying really initiated the big spiral down, and then it just snowballed from there."
To this day he's unsure what killed his brother, who was 14 years older than him. They told him at the time it was a heart defect, but in subsequent years he's heard the stories of his brother's own drug use, which likely played a bigger role.
"I feel like whenever you're really young and someone dies, they just tell you whatever sounds nice," he says. "It's not like I looked up his autopsy report or anything."
The death of his mother was definitely drug related, while his father's incarceration had to do with the lawless lives they were leading, beforehand and after.
"Oh, he's still around," Laramie says. "He's just doing his own thing, though. I was pretty close with him, but it wasn't until recently. It just kind of fell off. I love him as my dad and everything like that, but I'm just trying to do good and it's hard to do good when you're around people that do bad stuff.
"So, it's like no matter how much you love him, you got to do what's best for yourself at the end of the day. You can only help someone so much before it starts affecting you in the long run."
In the fight game, second chances are as welcome as they are celebrated. Where you've come from has a way of feeding, oftentimes poetically, into where you're going, because overcoming adversity is the ore beneath the surface. When Laramie first started fighting, it was more for something to do in his hometown of Windsor. His first amateur bout came when he was 16 years old. His first professional fight came just a week after turning 18, against a kid from Detroit named Keith Lee.
Laramie won that one via unanimous decision.
Tony Laramie's latest victory marked his third straight and earned him a shot at the Rizin flyweight title. (Photo courtesy Rizin)
This is when his own delinquency picked up. From the ages 18-21, he put together a solid run on the regional scene despite living up to his nickname as "The Wildman" on the streets, committing transgressions and doing drugs around the loose focus of his bouts. Despite this lifestyle he went 4-2 up until the pandemic in 2020, with one of his losses coming against the recent UFC debutant Louis Jourdain.
It was around this time that he caught a glimpse of what kind of path he was on when his best friend abruptly died. Instead of the loss becoming a moment of clarity, Laramie says it sent him down the darkest alleyway of his life.
"After that, for two, three years, it was just fucking a s*** show," he says. "I was just f***ing the dog, you know what I mean? And then I feel like the biggest ... I was pretty much f***ing the dog and not f***ing around up until I got pretty much signed with Rizin, if I were to be honest."
Still, he kept winning. In fact, he won all six fights he had during this period, leading up to his signing with Rizin in 2024.
"I was playing on the regional scene, I was half as good as I am now because I was just f***ing around still, but I was still winning all these fights," he says. "I feel like the biggest turning point was when I lost to Yuki Ito [at Rizin 50 in 2025], and I feel like that's what really flipped the script 180 degrees.
"I made the complete turnaround because I feel like I started making my way back when I started fighting again, but it wasn't an instant turnaround. I was still bumming a bit, still doing stupid s***. That was the fight when, honestly … I feel like I'm pretty straight edge now. I don't really do much of anything other than sit at home."
Sit at home and train. And win. And slowly turn his story into something more than a footnote.
Laramie has won each of his past three fights, beating Wataru Yamauchi, Takaki Soya and, most recently, Yuki Motoya at Rizin Landmark this summer. If you've watched him fight, he looks every bit the wildman, coming forward with pressure and pace and throwing punches with seeming abandon. His dismantling of Soya during the ending sequence in the third round looked as though he were unloading a thousand miseries all at once.
Perhaps he has found a way to pack all that has happened to him into his resolve, into his mettle, and that's what we're seeing come fight night. He says, "I'm willing to die in there no matter what" the way a normal person might say, "I could really go for a burger right about now." There's a nothing-to-lose element to his fighting style that has separated him from the pack.
"I feel like there's a lot of people, competitors — and I'm not saying they're not good at fighting or that they're not really a fighter or whatever — but I see when it comes down to the wire, they quit or flake out. You see it all the time, even at a top level. And I just feel like you'll never see that in one of my fights, no matter how bad I'm getting my ass beat or beating someone's ass. So, it's just, yeah, pretty much that's it."
Rizin likes the attitude. Last week Laramie signed a new contract with the Japanese-based promotion, ensuring that he'll be fighting there for the next couple of years. After that, he wants to come to the UFC, where he's been eyeing the top flyweights there, Joshua Van and Alexandre Pantoja, raise the profile of the class.
"[Van] has really good hands and stuff like that and he's a young guy," he says. "He's down to scrap. And there's one thing about young guys, they're OK with just letting go of the technique at some point and just getting in a firefight a lot of times. I used to be like that at times … "
He says this like a man who has lived through multiple lives. A fighter who knows the root of the word, even if he had to learn it the hard way. It's difficult for him not to roll out the "D" word when looking back at how he got here, because for him, fate boiled down to choosing between two doors.
"I just see it as pretty much just me accomplishing what I feel like what I was destined to do," he says. "That kind of sounds cocky a little bit, but I was always so dedicated towards the sport from a young age, 12 to 18. I loved it. I would think about it all the time. I'd be at home thinking about it. I'd be at school thinking about it. I'd be thinking about it before bed. I'd dream about it. And then that just fell off a bit because I just was doing the wrong thing and then it just wasn't really a priority anymore. Even when I was younger, it wasn't even really a priority. It was just a way of life for me."
He runs a hand through the mullet, growing fidgety at reliving the parts that made him who he is.
"I feel like this just adds to the story, you know?" he says. "I feel like if I've never f***ed up and I just accomplished everything earlier, it would just take away from almost my redemption arc of coming back from the shadows or some s***, almost like a superhero movie or something.
"And I feel like, by the time I'm done this sport, when people look at MMA, they're going to look at me. That's how I feel."
Source: Sports
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