Stick around the fight game long enough, and you’ll see the pattern plenty. A fighter comes along, has enough success to make a name, enough success to become a player in the title picture, before losing a big fight. Then two. Then another. Next thing you know, he begins disappearing from the more public arena and into other rings. Other cages. More dimly lit houses, with less publicity. Slipping back, loss by loss, into the obscurity from which they first emerged.

Back to Texas. To the cold gym mats that were at one time so warm.

Obscurity couldn’t contain me before, they think. Now it wants to consume me.

They return this time as a teller of stories that have happened, not of ones to come. Reluctant because they want to continue collecting better stories. Triumphant ones. Ones that feature gold.

Now forced to confront the two words that have always been kept at a safe distance over the horizon since the first wheeze of the heavy bag. Those two words no fighter ever wants to understand — the two scariest words in the fight world.

It’s over.

There was a time when James Vick was coming. It wasn’t that long ago, actually, back in 2018. After breaking in through "The Ultimate Fighter" as a lanky striker from Dallas, he won nine of his first 10 fights in the UFC’s lightweight division, and found himself as a centerpiece of the UFC’s big 25th Anniversary news conference to help promote his main event with Justin Gaethje. The 6-foot-3 Vick was the betting favorite against the UFC’s most frothy-mouthed berserker who had lost two in a row. He was headed northbound in the rankings, blasting through whoever the UFC put in front of him. He sat up on the dais alongside champions and ridiculed Gaethje for being a punch-drunk beating post and made it clear he had some names in mind to call out right after he got his hand raised.

Vick, who was 31 years old and in his prime, was confident the best was still in front of him. That all the biggest paydays and adulation were just beyond the town of Lincoln, Nebraska, where he was to meet Gaethje on his own terms — that is, right in the middle of the Octagon, standing directly in each other’s wheelhouse.

“Looking back on it, I felt I belonged up there because I had some big wins before that,” he says. “I went to Australia. I won the $50,000 bonus over there against Jake Matthews. I knocked out Joe Duffy at Madison Square Garden. That was very memorable — I mean, that was MSG. I won a first-round knockout here against [Polo] Reyes at American Airlines Arena in Dallas, right here in front of my home crowd. Those are all three moments I remember very well.”

Vick had also submitted Abel Trujillo during Super Bowl weekend in front of a partisan crowd in Houston, so his thrill ride had hit top speeds on his way to his main event with Gaethje. Yet a fighter never knows when that moment is to strike when all the dreams turn to delusion. For Vick, it was about 90 seconds into the biggest fight of his life, when Gaethje walked him down into the fence and delivered a right hand that folded Vick where he stood. It was so sudden it caught the commentary team off guard.

And that was it. The fight was over. He never saw it coming.

That’s where it started.

The spiral.

Yet he didn’t know it yet. Everybody gets caught. It was bound to happen to Vick, who loved nothing more than doing direct transactions in the leather trade in front of thousands of people.

He came back a little less than six months later and this time lost a decision to Paul Felder, who just happened to be the color man on the broadcast for the Gaethje fight. No shame in that. It was a tough, hard-fought battle. Then he got knocked out by Dan Hooker in San Antonio, where Vick again had the crowd. Now there was concern. Now there were gears turning and ideas of reinvention. So he went up a weight class to welterweight to face Niko Price, a merciless draw for a faltering fighter trying to stop the bleeding. He got knocked out again. This time in less than two minutes. Within a 14-month span, James Vick, who was closing in on a title shot as a lightweight, had now lost four in a row and was on the verge of being cut from the UFC.

Then he was.

That was the hardest blow to take, because as long as he was in the UFC, the top was visible.

“I’m not going to lie, it took me a long time to get over not being re-signed to the UFC and to realize the fact that I'm not going to be world champion,” he says. “It did take me a long time.”

A long, long time. It’s a dark yet common fight-game cruelty. There’s nothing worse and ultimately as inevitable as when you’re forced to reflect on your career with your mind still believing, against all supporting evidence, that all things are still possible. The body can take its beating. The mind is the last to go. It looks back at what went wrong, and how to correct it. It looks back at coaches and game plans. At what could’ve been.

For Vick, it was a lot of things fighting for the space to rationalize and explain. It was that he was always playing a game of catch-up to the rest of the field. As a kickboxing specialist who had only taken a couple of wrestling and grappling classes before landing on “The Ultimate Fighter,” it was beating people with meanness and determination rather than technique and skill. It was staying too long in camps that weren’t preaching (or teaching) defense.

“My regrets were remaining loyal to coaches,” he says.

“I stayed loyal to my original coach, my original boxing coach that I had through 22 amateur fights. I was a two-time golden gloves champion, and I was winning fights mostly because I was tough. We made it work. But I didn’t learn defense.”

In these reflections, the facts begin to comfort. In some ways Vick was an overachiever. He won fights against far more experienced fighters by simply digging deeper and out-dogging them. Sniping them with his reach advantage, which at 6-foot-3 he almost always had as a lightweight. Ratcheting up the nastiness and sapping his opponent’s will. Breaking them.

Still, the fight game is cruel in how it tells the truth. It wasn’t until he faced the best of the best that he understood just how cruel.

“Looking back on it now, I should have picked fights better, because I never turned down one fight,” he says. “I thought, 'Anybody, anytime, anywhere.' Had I said no, or had I turned down fights with someone, then maybe I would have progressed differently and still had a chance to be in the UFC.”

Vick regrouped after his UFC release, still looking to compete. Fifteen months later he headlined a XMMA card in Florida against veteran fighter Andre Fialho. It was a battle of two men headed in opposite directions. Fialho knocked out Vick in a half-round and a year later found himself doing a six-fight stint in the UFC.

As for James “The Texecutioner” Vick?

It was onto other venues, narrowed into places the world doesn’t look. It was on to the boxing ring. He fought three bouts in 2022 around his home state of Texas, going 2-1 in the process. That led to the Karate Combat pit in Florida, where he fought a couple of times, splitting results against Jorge Perez and Gabriele Cera, before making the walk in June of this year against Dana White Contender Series alum Rafael Alves.

He made the walk in.

Not out.

You’ve probably seen it. For most MMA fans, it was the first time they’d seen Vick in years. Karate Combat 47. In the dark, theater-lit, slope-edged blue pit. There he was, towering over Alves, who hadn’t knocked anybody out in five years. Circling. Then the set up. The switch kick from Alves just as Vick dropped his hands. The foot crashing home on the black spot, the side of Vick’s chin. His long Texas frame folding forward at the waist, and then slingshotting backwards. Toes stiff. Body prone and muted. Parted of the consciousness that holds us all together. Everyone roared at one of the most brutal knockouts of the year, until it became clear Vick wasn’t getting up.

Then the somber sequences, the things that Vick never saw. The stretcher. An ambulance. Breathing tubes. A seizure. The prayers that went up. The fight happened on a Saturday night. Vick didn’t really understand anything until Monday or Tuesday, when the grog of his medication wore off.

“I didn't really know what was happening until I was told at the hospital,” he says. “I just remember waking up and saying, ‘Why do I feel so bad?’ and them telling me, ‘You’re on this medication because you had a seizure.’ I never had a seizure, this was my first time I’d ever had one.”

Karate Combat’s president, Asim Zaidi, said on a podcast after the fight that Vick had been placed in an induced coma, which Vick says wasn’t the case. He says he was on a strong medication that essentially had the same effect, leaving him out of the conscious world and in a state of delirium.

“I got a thorough three-day neurological exam where they hooked everything up to my brain and everything's good,” he says.

Fortunate. James Vick dodged a bullet.

The visual was a tough one though, especially for anyone who watched Vick come up. When you sacrifice the entirety of your 20s sweating, training and pushing yourself to be the best, the reward shouldn’t be to end up unconscious in a viral clip.

The fight game is cruel, even to its most driven competitors.

James Vick is a good person. A father of two kids. A husband. A coach. He has his own gym in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, Peak Performance MMA, which has some up-and-coming fighters in it, including the UFC’s Victor Altamirano. People recognize him in Dallas. He’s the guy who fought in the UFC. Who succeeded in the UFC. He is a winner, by and large. He has been his whole life.

“I mean, did I make decent money? Nothing great,” he says. “I was on the sh**ty ‘Ultimate Fighter’ contract for the first part of my career. But I was very smart with my money. I'm a very frugal person. I live very cheap. I definitely didn't get rich or anything, but I was able to buy my own house and pay it off completely, and then buy a truck and completely pay it off. ”

He owns a piece of land too, where he likes to go fishing and hunting. Mostly he lives at his gym, where he takes his 6-year-old son, James Jr., along with his daughter to train five or six times a week. They are chips off the old block, though he’s not looking to make them into fighters. That’s a different kind of life, and one that he is now looking back on more and more as a thing of the past.

“I’m 37,” he says. “I’ve got a good partnership with the gym I'm at and things are going really good right now, honestly. I mean, it's been a phenomenal year for me, with the exception of getting caught in Karate Combat.”

In the last couple of weeks, Amanda Nunes has teased that she’s coming back. Donald Cerrone, who was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame last year, declared he is too. The words are hard to say, and they’re even harder to live by.

It’s over.

For a fighter like James Vick, who at one time not that long ago was on the verge of being a contender in the UFC, those words are on the tip of his tongue. He says his family doesn’t want him to fight anymore. He knows it’s all about love. But he’s a competitor, and the taste in his mouth is bittersweet.

“To be honest, if I didn’t have kids, I would definitely fight again,” he says. “I’m not trying to go back to the UFC or even the Karate Combat anymore, it’s just — I don't like going out like that. You know what I mean? I don’t care if I go to Thailand and fight a f**king cab driver, it would be good for my mindset for the rest of my life. Or if I find a boxing fight here and try to fight a B-level fighter and win, you know, something.

“It’s still better than losing like that.”