Nathan "The Reaper" Rivera

Nathan Rivera is 5-0 in BKFC and ranked second in the world at featherweight. Two days before he sat down for this one, he quit his job to fight full time.

Rivera opened the second season of Salty's Fight Talk. Cason Banyas had been watching his fights from the start and brought him in as a local kid, though the two had not met until that day. Rivera came in off a November co main event in Michigan, where he stopped Tommy Stratom by TKO and dislocated his jaw doing it. It was his first co main, fought in the sixteen foot ring, which he says feels like a phone booth.

He got to fighting in Southern California, where his father took him next door to watch a karate and taekwondo studio while his mother shopped, and later put on Bruce Lee films and Manny Pacquiao watch parties. He took his first fight in 2020 and worked out it could pay for a life. Rivera treats bare knuckle as its own sport. A shorter man who wants to crowd him is a clinch problem, since tying up makes the referee separate them and the fight restarts at his range. That was the plan for Stratom. On a card where fifteen fights might produce fifteen knockouts, he carries wanted posters into the ring, and he once taped a note under Feldman's chair saying he would knock his man out and wanted the Canada card.

As an amateur he went a year and six months with three days out of camp, boxing between his MMA fights while opponent after opponent pulled out. The title shot he finally worked his way to fell through on two days' notice. He gave up for a couple of weeks and hit the bars, then got smoked in sparring by a sixteen year old with a hundred and sixty fights. He was twenty four. He locked back in. The weight is the other bill. He walks around at 175, diets to 160, then cuts six pounds the night before and four the morning of, which he calls brutal and wonders how long his body will take. Until this month it all fitted around an outside sales job, out of the house at 7:30 and back at 9:30.

His mother raised him and his sister at home, no daycare, which he says he only understood once he was grown. Getting his wife out of work meant more to him than getting himself out. He calls the gym a third space, where a cop and a gang member share a mat and the only thing measured is how hard a man works. Asked what he does with an evening now, he said a puzzle with his wife at six o'clock, then tea.