By admin 
CENTENNIAL, Colo. – In the middle of her burgeoning white-collar career, it took about 30 seconds for Alex Apodaca to realize she was made for the cage.
Read more Foiled Search Of RV Leads To Summary Suspension Of Top Canterbury Park Trainer
The Denver resident, who is an IT consultant for the audit, tax and advisory firm KPMG, made her amateur mixed martial arts debut in Cheyenne, Wyo., in January 2021. A punch to the face broke her orbital bone shortly after the opening bell, but Apodaca powered through and won by unanimous decision.
“Immediately in that fight, everything went double- and triple-vision,” Apodaca recalled. “But I just kept fighting. And after I won, I was like, ‘Damn, I think I’m made for this (expletive).’ “
After three years as an amateur, Apodaca turned pro in 2024, and her internal monologue from that first fight in Cheyenne recently became a self-fulfilling prophecy. She is, indeed, made for this – on Aug. 25, Apodaca stunned heavily favored Bella Mir in the main event of Dana White’s Contender Series to earn a UFC contract.
Apodaca was a +6000 underdog to Mir, the daughter of former UFC heavyweight champion Frank Mir, entering the octagon, meaning a $100 bet would’ve netted a gambler $6,000 in winnings. Apodaca’s unanimous decision at the Meta APEX in Las Vegas is the largest upset in UFC history, counting all Contender Series fights and those within the actual promotion itself.
After the fight, White acknowledged he had a vested personal interest in seeing Mir win. White has been a mentor to Mir for the last four years. But the UFC boss also admitted that “nobody in this sport is that big of an underdog, ever.”
Apodaca’s circle knew that the 32-year-old could exploit Bella Mir’s inexperience in what White called a “deep water” fight.
“If Bella had 20 fights and we’ve seen her run her game plan enough times against skilled opponents, those odds would have made sense,” said Robin Solsbery, one of Apodaca’s training partners at Tiger Beetle Martial Arts in Centennial.
“Alex was Bella’s first real test, and we saw the result. The odds were because of hype, because of (Mir’s) name, and it’s because we’ve only seen Bella blow people out of the water. But Alex was ready for all of Bella’s strengths (as an NCAA national champion wrestler). Alex and her coaches did the study. They drilled the grappling. She was totally prepared, and it showed in the fight.”
From tennis, dance to the cage
Apodaca’s rise to the UFC is even more unlikely considering that she stumbled upon the sport while in college at the University of Texas.
She played tennis and was on the dance team in high school in her native Austin, and it wasn’t until she was doing door-to-door sales as part of a college internship that she walked into a UFC gym and discovered MMA. Inside the gym, a video of UFC superstar Ronda Rousey was playing; for Apodaca, it was a moment of serendipity.
Apodaca enrolled in a cardio kickboxing class at the gym. Then she got into Muay Thai. That led to boxing and jiu-jitsu, and then she picked up wrestling. Fast forward a dozen years, and she has emerged as a potent blend of all those disciplines, although her early professional success has been rooted in her ability as a long-range striker. At 5-foot-7, Apodaca has a 6-foot reach.
“Alex could contend with the top 10 fighters (in the bantamweight division) right now,” said Vellore Caballero, Apodaca’s jiu-jitsu coach. “That being said, I hope the UFC brings her along slowly and gives her an opportunity to get her footing before they thrust her into those type of fights. You never know because after a big high-profile win, like the one that she just had over Bella, that’s a possibility.
“Whatever the case, I think she has all the minerals and makings of a champion. I don’t see any reason why, if we stay the course and we continue to improve and make adjustments where we need to and game plan appropriately for these opponents, that she can’t go and beat everybody.”
Apodaca’s road to becoming a fighter capable of going toe-to-toe against the world’s best was filled with significant injury adversity.
After her first pro fight, a split-decision loss in March 2024, Apodaca suffered a concussion during training that sidelined her for about nine months. She had habitual dizziness, sickness and chronic migraines, and her brain issues were topped off by an appendix infection that required emergency surgery, as well as labrum tears in both her hips.
Through it all, she had to sit on her first loss for a year and a half before returning to fight in Sept. 2025, her first win as a pro.
“I kept trying to get back in the gym, but my neurologist was like, ‘You’re under too much stress, so your brain’s not healing,” Apodaca said. “At that time, I had some stuff going on in my personal life that was really weighing on my mental. I kept pushing, but it took so much time to come back. I was thinking I was done fighting.
Read more AP Top 25 Week 3: How Far Did Ohio State Fall?
“I just kept showing up (to the neurologist). And it’s so hard when you’re spending so much money to get back to something that doesn’t make you money. It just shows how much I really love fighting, because I think 99 percent of people would have quit.”
Balancing a desk job and fighting
Since returning to action, Apodaca has been on a heater. She’s riding a four-fight win streak into the UFC, all of which came by unanimous decision.
Across 2025 and ’26, she had two fights that were canceled last-minute due to her opponent pulling out, as well as wins this year in January in Peak Fighting, in July in Fury Fighting Championship, and then in August over Mir.
“She spent over the last year in a perpetual fight camp,” said Carsyn Nash, one of Apodaca’s training partners. “She was really overworked, but she handled it beautifully. It showed that she’s definitely soldier material.”
Apodaca balances her training and fight schedule with her career at KPMG, where she’s worked for 10 years. She has an alternative work arrangement with KPMG that allows her to take a couple of hours in the middle of the day for training. This year, Apodaca switched gyms to Tiger Beetle, which was founded in February by Colorado native/UFC fighter Cory Sandhagen and his coach, Carrington Banks.
It’s not unusual for Apodaca to show up to KPMG meetings with a black eye, but her coworkers and clients have gotten used to it. Apodaca had a 7:30 a.m. virtual meeting the morning after her win over Mir, but Apodaca’s boss, Cat McCauley – one of the fighter’s biggest fans – texted her, “Don’t you dare get on that call in the morning.”
Apodaca obliged, but worked remotely that day anyway, and then was on the Thursday morning call, less than 36 hours after her life-changing upset of Mir. McCauley notes most of that call was spent with Apodaca’s KPMG peers reveling in her victory. And McCauley sees parallels between Apodaca’s success at KPMG and her victories in the octagon.
“She has done a lot of different types of work for us, but some of the feedback that I’ve gotten from a lot of the other teams that she’s worked with is her willingness to learn and adapt,” McCauley said. “We’ll be like, ‘Alex, you’ve never done this before, but we need someone to do it.’ She takes the mindset of ‘Well, I guess I’m learning this now.’ She’s taken that approach into her fighting as well, and into how she prepares in her training to make sure she’s ready for every opponent.”
The juggle between KPMG and fighting won’t stop anytime soon, even with Apodaca’s UFC debut on the horizon, likely sometime in 2027. Considering fighters in the promotion often start with a “12 and 12” deal – $12,000 to show up, and another $12,000 if you win – there is no current financial incentive for Apodaca to quit her job at KPMG.
Even if Apodaca walks away from her first fight with $24,000 or slightly more, when factoring in the cost of travel, recovery, coaching and management fees, her profit is fairly small. So Caballero predicts that Apodaca won’t need to choose between her office career and her octagon career until her second or third UFC contract (as a newcomer, Apodaca’s first contract for four fights).
“A lot of times when people are talking about fighters working two jobs, we’re talking about guys who are driving DoorDash or Uber or working at Home Depot or a bar or whatever,” Caballero. “No offense to any of those fighters, but Alex has a legit career that she went to college for, with a big company that’s well-established, a 401K, and all that kind of stuff.
“So I do think we’ll get to that crossroads where the money and the commitment required and everything will definitely make her have to choose, because I truly do think she’s going to be a UFC star. But I don’t think it’s anywhere near right now.”
In the meantime, Apodaca is adjusting to her newfound fame.
Over the past two weeks, her Instagram inbox has been flooded with messages and she’s had many media requests. But the more her life has suddenly changed, the more Apodaca has stayed the same.
She’s still a nerd for her work at KPMG. She plays the drums, loves reading Hemingway and journaling. She enjoys a fun night out on the town, cutting loose with her girlfriends. She runs, swims and bikes around Washington Park. Through it all, said her close friend Kat Johnson, Apodaca seeks out “peace and calm and consistency to remember the little things that got her to this point.”
“I don’t think the fame is anything that will ever get to her because she’s just so rooted in who she is,” Johnson said. “She is very much a grounded person in that sense, so I just don’t see (making the UFC) being a distraction. I think she’ll get annoyed with (the attention) before she actually lets it disrupt who she is or what she’s doing.
“Winning (the bout against Mir) was like the ‘Oh (expletive)’ moment for her, because it all happened so fast with how everything came together for her this year. But in the same way, that breakthrough has been years in the making. She won’t ever forget that.”
Read more Sofia Vergara Has Fans In Awe Of Swimsuit Photo at 54
Copyright 2026 Tribune Content Agency. All Rights Reserved.
This story was originally published September 13, 2026 at 2:41 AM.