This insanity went on for years—way longer than it should have, Cummins admits—until someone finally took down a license plate and reported the troublemakers to the cops. Upon his arrest, Cummins says he confessed to everything. “I didn’t have a lawyer,” he says. “I was an idiot.” Prosecutors wanted to lock him up in the state penitentiary for a year, but eventually his sentence got whittled down to seven months in the county jail. Cummins remembers sitting in the rec room, watching a heavyweight wrestler he had mentored at Lehigh University win the national championships. “I felt like such a loser,” he says.
With a felony burglary charge on his record, fighting became Cummins’s means to support himself. He sold all his possessions and landed in Southern California with two suitcases and his bike, a Niner Air 9. For four years, he lived at his manager’s house in Dana Point, struggling to get anyone to fight him. His big break came in February 2014, when a fighter dropped out of a match with Daniel Cormier, another former wrestler, and Cummins took the match with just ten days to train. He lost, but his place in the UFC was secured.