⚡️🇵🇸Belal Muhammad talks about what inspired him to get into MMA.
I saw a teacher from high school fighting in Strikeforce on Showtime. I messaged him and he told me that the gym was near my mom’s house. I got in touch with him and started training. I fell in love with the sport…
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— Home of Fight (@Home_of_Fight)
August 31, 2024
Belal Muhammad probably would never have tried mixed martial arts if it weren’t for his high school wrestling coach.
Growing up in Chicago, Muhammad attended Brockton High School and tried out for wrestling for two years before enrolling at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to study law and not consider playing sports.
But when Muhammad saw his high school wrestling coach competing in mixed martial arts for Strikeforce, which was acquired by UFC in 2011, he was intrigued. He reached out to his teacher and discovered the gym where he trained was near his mother’s house. He began training with his teacher when he was home on weekends and soon fell in love with the sport. And after raising his hand in his first amateur bout, there was no looking back.
“I wrestled in high school for two years, then I went to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. I was going to study law. I wasn’t going to play sports,” he told WGNNews. “Then I randomly found my high school coach in the paper. He was a fighter and competed on Showtime’s Strikeforce. I messaged him on Facebook and said, ‘Are you a fighter?’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I’m a fighter now. I’m a mixed martial artist.’ [his] It was close to my mom’s house, so I’d meet up with him and train whenever I went home on the weekends. It just snowballed from there. I fell in love with the sport. I started training more, and training more. And then I went to my first amateur fight, and once I won, once I got my hand raised, I was hooked.”
Muhammad’s parents urged him to pursue a career in law, but the future UFC fighter kept putting it off until he lost. But Muhammad’s legal career never came to fruition, and he made it to the UFC, where he won the welterweight championship with a unanimous decision victory over Leon Edwards at UFC 304 in July of this year.
“I told my parents, ‘Let me keep going until I lose,'” Muhammad said. “They were like, ‘Finish law school, go and become a lawyer, it’ll be a lot safer that way.’ But I said, ‘I’ll do it after I lose,’ and then I went to the UFC and now I’m a world champion.”
