Born in Portmarnock, Ireland, in November 1997, Garry came up through the Irish MMA scene during the post-McGregor boom and signed with the UFC in 2021 after a clean regional run. His ring name nods to his wife and coach, Brazilian Layla Machado, and his ties to Brazil run deep enough that, as he told Covers.com, Brazilian media often cover him as one of their own. He moved his training base to Florida early in his UFC tenure, and the Irish-Brazilian identity has become central to how he sells himself. MMA Mania has framed a potential Garry-Makhachev fight as “Conor McGregor’s protege vs. Khabib Nurmagomedov’s protege” — a framing Garry has happily leaned into.
In the cage, Garry is a long, rangy outside striker who uses his reach and footwork to manage distance, mixing teeps, jabs and body kicks before stepping into combinations. His significant strike accuracy sits at 58.5%, a high number for a volume welterweight, and he lands 4.78 significant strikes per minute. The ground game runs through takedown defense, not offensive wrestling; his own takedown accuracy is barely over 31%. Critics point to a thin finishing rate at the elite level — five straight decisions on the current ledger — but his fight IQ and cardio have held up across five-round bouts.
His UFC résumé reads like a tour of the division. He started with finishes of Song Kenan and Daniel Rodriguez, then outpointed Neil Magny at UFC 292 and Geoff Neal at UFC 298. A split decision over Michael Page at UFC 303 set up the Rakhmonov fight, the lone blemish. The bounce-back is the part that matters: a unanimous decision over knockout artist Carlos Prates in the April 2025 main event that carried his name, then a clear win over former champion Belal Muhammad in Doha on November 22, 2025. That’s the result that pushed him to the front of the queue.
Garry is now openly campaigning for Makhachev, who took the welterweight belt from Jack Della Maddalena at UFC 322 and has not been booked since. When Dana White told him the champion has hand issues, Garry hit back on Instagram in March 2026: “He doesn’t want to fight.” Whether the UFC books him next or pivots to another contender, his pitch is simple and getting harder to brush off: nobody at 170 has fought a deeper schedule.