One October day, three years ago, Errol Spence Jr. came across an eerie tableau. He was in a hospital room trying to recognize the shadowy figure across from him. A wavy abrasion creased his eyebrows and zig-zagged up towards his hairline like a road on a map. He was barely able to stand. He was barely able to see through the two swollen slits that were his eyes.

The twisted Halloween mask that was reflecting back wasn’t him, Spence told himself.

It couldn’t be him.

Yet it was.

“I was so swollen I didn’t even recognize myself,” Spence told The Ring a few years ago before his comeback fight against Danny Garcia in December 2020.

No undefeated fighter has a comeback fight, unless they’ve survived a life-and-death struggle as Spence did after his near-fatal car crash in the early morning hours of Oct. 10, 2019, when “The Truth” wrecked his Ferrari in Dallas in a one-car accident that left him hospitalized in critical condition for weeks.

His life was in danger. His boxing career was in danger. Everything Spence had worked for, everything he had earned, almost disappeared.

The second step in Spence nearing a whole version of himself comes this Saturday, when the WBC/IBF titlist and Ring’s No. 2-rated welterweight faces arguably his toughest test, WBA titlist Yordenis Ugas.

Cuban expatriate Ugas (27-4, 12 knockouts) will hope to land his second upset in as many fights before a Spence-leaning crowd at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, on Showtime Pay-Per-View (9 p.m. ET/6 p.m. PT).

Ugas, 35, is coming off his star-turning victory over legendary Manny Pacquiao in August 2021. The 32-year-old Spence (27-0, 21 KOs) will be fighting for the first time in 16 months, since he beat Garcia.

Ugas uses distance well; he knows how to position his feet and does come forward.

“I don’t see Ugas as being tricky at all, I think you’re putting too much emphasis on that, most Cuban fighter use angles, they stay on their feet and their toes, but Ugas is not even that,” Spence said recently. “The only thing he really does is use his overhand. I banged with Danny Garcia, I banged with Kell Brook, I banged with Shawn Porter.

“I don’t exactly stay in front of a fighter. I think this fight adds to my legacy. Every fight that led up to this is just as important as this fight.”

Spence has already won the fight of his life three ago when he survived the car crash.

The life lessons learned from that episode he said will always resonate with him.

“But it does make you think, and it changes you, it changed me, my kids growing up without a father, you take it for granted, until you’re lying in a hospital wondering what happened,” Spence told The Ring in 2019. “It changed my life, because I almost lost my life. I know people say all of the time, ‘You take this for granted, you take that for granted,’ but you don’t realize what you have until it’s almost taken away. Well, my life was almost taken away and it’s made me see things a lot differently.

“Like boxing, for example. You put so much time and effort into something, and like that, in a blink, it’s all gone. I know how hard I worked to get to this point. The house and the cars, the success, it’s all great, but when I was lying in that bed, I thought about my kids the most.

“There were a lot of nights I cursed; I almost blew it.”

Ugas owes Spence a lot. It was supposed to be Spence in the ring against Pacquiao last August instead of Ugas, but when the Texas southpaw suffered a retinal detachment/break in his left eye during sparring weeks before the fight, Ugas stepped in and became a fixture in boxing history as the future Hall of Famer Pacquiao’s last fight.

“I thought (Ugas) beat Shawn Porter in 2019 and then he beat Pacquiao with an arm injury,” Spence said. “He’s a great warrior, but I believe that it’s my time to show the world that I’m here to win another belt.

“At the end of the day, I want to be the undisputed welterweight champion of the world. This is another step toward that goal. I’ve been the shot caller. I’m the big fish at 147.

“My eye has been good. Sparring has been great and I’ve been looking good. I’ve taken some hits and my eye feels great. I haven’t been in the ring in a year and a half, but I’ve been focused, and in the gym training every day.

“I feel very sharp right now. My last couple of fights I was really only able to train for about two months. But I’ve been in the gym for the last six months getting ready for this.”

Going back again to 2019, about two months before he fought Garcia, Spence admitted, “I am a changed man. I can’t change what happened.”

He continues to work on what happens to the man who walked away alive.

“That’s the only way I can look at it,” Spence said.

Joseph Santoliquito is an award-winning sportswriter who has been working for Ring Magazine/RingTV.com since October 1997 and is the president of the Boxing Writers Association of America. He can be followed on twitter @JSantoliquito.

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