The reeducation of UFC vet and Legacy FC 29 headliner Leonard Garcia

These days it’s not hard to find Leonard Garcia. Head down to the Jackson-Winkeljohn gym in Albuquerque and wait for practice to start. He’ll be there. At least, he will now that he’s been cut by the UFC and forced to reinvent himself on the small circuit.

“That’s what it took for me,” Garcia told MMAjunkie after a spirited morning sparring session in late February. “It took being cut to wake me up.”

You hear stuff like that from fighters who’ve been dropped by the UFC, and usually it’s just words. They head to some regional promotion, win one and lose one, and so begins the slow fade into obscurity. Three years later you see a headline that reminds you, wait, that guy is still fighting?

That’s how people looked at the 34-year-old Garcia after he was cut following five consecutive losses in the UFC, the last of which came via unanimous decision at the hands of Cody McKenzie in April of 2013. Garcia knew it, too. He heard it in the way people talked about him, saw it in the faces of friends and fans.

“Leading up to my first fight out of the UFC, it felt like people had decided, well, it was fun while it lasted,” Garcia said. “Go ahead and go to some small organization. I was even an underdog against one of the guys I fought and I was thinking, man, I shouldn’t be an underdog. But all of that was motivation.”

In fact, Garcia felt so motivated that he went right out and kicked Rey Trujillo upside the head for a TKO victory in his first fight with Legacy FC. A few months later he submitted Nick Gonzalez, then in December he knocked out Kevin Aguilar in the first round to claim the Legacy FC featherweight title.

Garcia will defend the belt for the first time tonight when he takes on Shane Howell at Legacy FC 29 in Tulsa (AXS TV, 10 p.m. ET). The difference between the fighter people will see in Legacy and the one they saw in the UFC, Garcia said, is that this one actually shows up to practice. Ironically, it was when he was fighting on the biggest stage that he did the least preparation, often no more than two or three training sessions a week. So what, if anything, was he thinking back then?

The answer to that question depends on who you ask. According to Garcia’s longtime coach Greg Jackson, some of it had to do with the influence of Garcia’s friend and teammate Donald Cerrone.

“‘Cowboy’ is the kind of guy who, if he decides he’s going to go skeet shooting, he’ll be the best skeet shooter you ever saw,” Jackson said. “That’s just who he is. He can see something one time and he’s got it. Leonard needs to put a little more work in.”

The problem arose, Jackson said, because “Leonard was trying to train like ‘Cowboy,’ but he’s not ‘Cowboy’ – he’s Leonard.”

According to Garcia, it also had something to do with a change in attitude during his long UFC losing streak. He’d become a bonus-chaser, he said. The guy who would go out and brawl, who would block punches with his face, who would get fans on their feet at any price.

“I was content with being that guy,” Garcia said. “I wasn’t chasing the title anymore. I thought since I’m so far away from the title, what’s the point? Just try to make some bonus money. That’s exactly what it was. Just trying to get out there and telling myself, well, at least it’s going to be the most exciting fight on the card. That was my goal.”

Because that was the extent of his motivation, Garcia said, he didn’t feel the need to get in the gym and hone his skills. If anything, he was happy just to have enough cardio to take his opponents to a decision. That actually felt like a kind of victory to him.

Now that he’s Legacy’s featherweight champ, however, all that has changed. Now he has something to protect, something to fight – and train – for.

“Like this morning, I hit a guy with a good right hand body shot and dropped him,” Garcia said, still dripping with sweat from that day’s sparring session. “Had that happened before, I’d have been like, I’m good. Take off the gloves and go home. But now, ever since the cut, I do five rounds of everything. I’m training like the fighter I should’ve been.”

He also has more appreciation for the little things, he said, like the fact that he gets to essentially work out and then entertain for a living. The financial realities of his new life became clear very quickly, he said, “because if you leave the UFC while you’re fighting for $25[,000] and $25[,000], then you go to an organization where you’re fighting for 10 and 10, that’s a huge difference.”

It also helps Garcia to have a larger goal that extends beyond his immediate future, beyond even his run as Legacy featherweight champ. He’s not doing all this work just to stay afloat on the small circuit, he said. Like almost every fighter who’s been cut from the UFC, he has designs on getting back there some day.

“The fact that they contact me after every fight, that makes me feel good, makes me feel relevant,” Garcia said. “This last time after I won the Legacy title, I went to the UFC and talked to [matchmaker] Sean Shelby and he told me, ‘Look, you’re doing everything you need to do. If you can put two more wins together, there’s no way anyone can deny you a comeback.’”

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