WASHINGTON, D.C. — Beneath the warm glow of Madison Square Garden’s spiderweb ceiling, cruising to a decision victory while carrying the confidence of a fighter who’d never lost before, Aiemann Zahabi pressed his opponent into the fence with a flurry, seeking to set up a left hook.

It’s the last thing he remembers. A half hour of Zahabi’s memory is lost, from eating a Ricardo Ramos spinning back elbow on the button, to the crown of his head bouncing off the canvas, to walking backstage and speaking to doctors while they shone a flashlight in his pupils and glided fingers along his jawbone.

Zahabi’s next recollection comes in the back of an ambulance, being transported to the hospital while realizing he’d lost his undefeated MMA record, suffered the first knockout of his life, and ceded the career momentum he’d built over the last half-decade all at once. 

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“I’d never tasted defeat — never been concussed or rocked or dropped in training ever,” Zahabi says, reflecting on that 2017 loss to Ramos at UFC 217. “I lost my confidence.”

It took a full 18 months for the consequences of that experience to materialize at a UFC Fight Night in Ottawa, when Zahabi, who dealt with significant post-concussion symptoms for the better part of a year following his knockout, finally returned to the octagon to face UFC newcomer Vince Morales.

Fighting timidly without the self-assurance that once defined him, Zahabi left his corner all three rounds, thinking about how to prevent his opponent from knocking him out rather than the opposite. Hesitant to move forward and pull the trigger, he landed single-digit strike totals in each of his first two rounds and whiffed on four of five half-hearted takedown attempts, dropping a unanimous decision to a fighter beneath his true talent level.

Without those two losses, and nearly two full years of soul searching that followed, Zahabi doesn’t believe he’d be here now, preparing to put a seven-fight win streak on the line against one of the UFC’s most marketable stars — with a bantamweight title shot hanging in the balance — at the company’s marquee event of 2026.

“I feel that way because both losses were at opposite ends of the same spectrum,” says Zahabi, who will fight ostentatious former champion Sean O’Malley Saturday at UFC Freedom 250 on the White House’s south lawn. “One of them, I went out because of my arrogance. I disregarded my defence and took too much risk. And the next one, I was a shell of myself. I couldn't open up. I didn't take any risk at all.”

The son of Lebanese immigrants who fled Beirut in the 1970’s during the country’s civil war, Zahabi grew up in........

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