Of the half-dozen fighters Coach Rex has sent to The Ultimate Fighter and the UFC, Tony “El Cucuy” Ferguson took it the furthest. Winner of The Ultimate Fighter 13. UFC interim lightweight champion. Eleven straight wins at lightweight, the longest streak that division has seen. Jiu-jitsu black belt. Part of that road ran through a cage in Ventura.
The Ventura years
Ventura County got its first dedicated MMA gym in 2007: Hostility MMA. Rex was hired there to teach no-gi jiu-jitsu and MMA, and that room is where the local fight scene started to grow up. Ferguson trained under Rex during those Hostility years and after, in the same stretch that Rex opened Rock N Roll Fight Company in 2008.
Look at the photos from that era and you will see a cage with neon-green fence mesh. That is the old room, before downtown, before the hexagon cage on Thompson. Rex in a black rash guard with the skull badge. Ferguson grinning, throwing a fist at the camera. Nothing staged about it.
What he took with him
Rex’s game is no-gi jiu-jitsu. That is the specialty, and it is still what he teaches first. Scrambles. Guillotines. Getting back to your feet instead of settling for a comfortable losing position. A wrestling-first approach that says the ground is somewhere you go on purpose, not somewhere you end up.
Watch what Ferguson became known for and you can see the shape of it. Relentless pace. Chains of attacks instead of one big idea. A man who is never done in a scramble. Plenty of coaches touched that career over the years, and Rex is not claiming to have built it. He is saying he had his hands on it early, when it mattered most, and that the same material is what he still drills with a beginner in a garage in Oxnard.
If you want to know what that material looks like on day one, start with gi or no-gi and the first submissions a beginner learns.
The seminar
Years later, Ferguson came back to Rock N Roll Fight Company to run a seminar.
Be honest about the evidence for that, because we are asking you to trust the rest of it too. There is no flyer, no date and no event listing. What there is, is a photograph from the gym with a kid in the event shirt: “Seminar with UFC fighter Tony ‘El Cucuy’ Ferguson, Rock N Roll Fight Company.” A shirt gets printed for one reason. So the seminar happened, and we cannot tell you which month.
He is not the only one
Jeremy Jackson, Lodune Sincaid, Chris Beal, Jesse Newell and Joe Henle also came through and also reached The Ultimate Fighter and the UFC. They are all public fighters with public records, which is the point: you can go and look. The fighters page lists them, and there is a short answer on which fighters Rex has trained if you want the one-paragraph version. If you would rather verify the coach than the students, read Rex’s credentials.
What any of this does for you
You are probably not trying to win The Ultimate Fighter. That is fine. Nobody who walks in is.
What it tells you is that the person holding the pads has coached at that level and can still explain a stance to someone who has never thrown a punch. Those are two different skills, and most rooms only have one of them. Rex has been doing both since 2008, one on one, at your place.
Here is what you’ll learn if you start.