Arman Tsarukyan Reveals All: Sleeping in Cars to Fighting in Hockey Locker Rooms

Arman Tsarukyan didn’t follow the typical route to mixed martial arts. The UFC’s number one lightweight contender spent most of his youth dreaming of the NHL, not the octagon. In a recent interview with Daniel Cormier, the 29-year-old revealed a childhood marked by hardship, weight-cutting at age seven, and locker room brawls that foreshadowed his fighting career.​

Arman Tsarukyan Reveals All

Born in Akhalkalaki, Georgia, Tsarukyan moved to Russia when he was around three years old. The transition was brutal. “We didn’t have a house, my father was working all day, we had nothing,” Arman Tsarukyan told Cormier. “We slept in the car. We didn’t have a house at that moment, it was cold, and I lived in a cold place too.”

The family’s fortunes changed when a Dagestani family offered shelter. “One Dagestani family said, ‘Oh, come and you can live with us, don’t pay money.’ We stayed with them like one year until we built our house,” he explained. His father, Nairi Tsarukyan, worked in construction and eventually built a successful business. By the time Arman was 12, life had stabilized.

Wrestling, Weight Cuts, and Why He Quit

Tsarukyan’s combat sports journey started at age six with freestyle wrestling, though karate came first. “Before that we went to karate, but karate was a little bit far from our house and my dad couldn’t drive us there, and close to our home was a freestyle wrestling gym,” he said. He stayed for three or four years, showing enough promise that coaches believed he could become an Olympic champion.​

But there was a problem that turned him away from the sport: extreme weight cutting for a child. “When I was seven, I was cutting weight. Seven, eight years old,” Tsarukyan recalled. The coaches didn’t understand the damage they were causing. “They told us, ‘You shouldn’t eat for two days, don’t drink anything, you gotta cut and go for this weight class.’ I was hating that sport because of cutting weight”.​

He’s adamant about protecting future generations from the same experience. “Even if I’m going to have kids who wrestle I’m not going to let them cut weight. That’s the worst part for a wrestler, especially from seven, eight until like fourteen years old, it makes no sense. It’s only practice, it doesn’t matter if you win or lose”.

The Hockey Years

At nine years old, Tsarukyan made a decision that would define the next chapter of his life. “All my teammates from school played hockey all day. I was playing with them amateur and still I was wrestling, competing in wrestling when I was nine, but three times a week in winter I’d go to the ice and play with them,” he explained. A coach saw potential and suggested he train seriously.​

His father fully supported the switch, despite the expense. “My dad bought me all the hockey stuff because it’s a little bit expensive. He said, ‘If you need a professional coach or to go somewhere, send you to Canada or whatever you want.’ I said, ‘Here is pretty good,’ and I stayed there”. Tsarukyan played for Hockey Club Amur’s junior team in Khabarovsk, a region near Alaska where hockey dominated the sports landscape.

“I started at nine. I was supposed to start at five, six, because those three years are big in hockey. When I was nine or ten, they were already playing four, five years. The competition is on a different level,” he said. Out of roughly 30 players, only three made professional clubs, and one friend reached the NHL. Tsarukyan wasn’t among them.

Locker Room Fights – Where Fighting Met Hockey

While Tsarukyan struggled on the ice, his wrestling background gave him a different kind of advantage. When Cormier asked how much he used his wrestling skills in hockey, the answer was revealing. “I used wrestling mostly in the locker room. We were fighting in the locker room and I was using my wrestling. On the ice I wasn’t that good at fighting, so my teammates didn’t try to mess with me”.​

“Where I grew up, that’s why fighting is easy for me. I like fighting, I don’t know where it comes from, maybe from my blood,” he said. His father would encourage childhood scraps. “Even as a kid we’d go somewhere with two families and there’s a kid and my dad would always say, ‘Can you beat this guy?’ I’d say, ‘Yeah,’ and we fight. Ten-year-old kids in the village, that’s how it is. I never lost those kid fights because I knew wrestling—I knew how to shoot single and double leg and that was enough”.​

The Turn to MMA

At 17, Tsarukyan’s hockey dreams ended. He returned to combat sports through grappling, which was gaining popularity in Russia at the time. “The grappling was so popular that moment and I said okay what I can do, I cannot be a hockey player, I should go to try to this grappling and I tried grappling and I won Russian competition right away and I said it’s so easy, maybe I should fight”.

His father was less enthusiastic. “My father said okay it’s so dangerous sport just do one fight and like get out of there because you can be stupid”. But Tsarukyan started winning. He made his professional MMA debut in September 2015 at age 18, earning around $4,000 per fight in places like Korea. He eventually achieved Master of Sports rankings in both wrestling and MMA.

Unlike many Russian fighters, Tsarukyan’s father took a hands-off approach. “He never pushed me. He just supported me. He never told me, ‘Why are you sleeping? You gotta go train.’ He was never in sport, he doesn’t know how sport works. He just supported me; I did what I wanted to do”. That family success gave him freedom. “I told my dad, ‘If I’m not a good fighter, just tell me and I’ll go do something else.’ But I started winning and became champion, and he saw it”.

The single and double leg takedowns he learned between ages six and nine remained his foundation. “The same single and double leg that I shoot when I was from 6 to 9, I shoot the same until nowadays”. Those early wrestling years, combined with locker room scraps and a late start in professional fighting, created one of the UFC’s most well-rounded lightweights.

Today, Tsarukyan sits at number one in the UFC lightweight rankings and 15th in the pound-for-pound standings, yet remains on the outside looking in at the title picture. Despite riding a five-fight winning streak that includes victories over Charles Oliveira, Beneil Dariush, and Dan Hooker, he watched from cageside as Justin Gaethje captured the interim lightweight title against Paddy Pimblett at UFC 324 this past weekend.

His path to gold was derailed when he withdrew from a scheduled championship bout with Islam Makhachev at UFC 311 in January 2025 due to a back injury sustained during his weight cut. With undisputed champion Ilia Topuria planning to return between April and June to face Gaethje, the kid who learned to fight in hockey locker rooms now faces another test of patience; waiting for his moment to prove those childhood scraps in the village were just the beginning.