Leon Edwards: Survival and belief key to real-life Rocky story
UFC world champion last weekend
For any champion in a fight sport, the story will always be about the struggle to get to the top, and the striving for excellence against rivals. Yet as Edwards' cage nickname 'Rocky' suggests, the narrative goes deeper with him. The path to his victory last weekend is one with survival written all along it.
He survived to the very end of a fight deep into the fifth round against an opponent in Kamaru Usman, who had beaten him before, and who was making his sixth defence of the 170lbs welterweight crown.Edwards was the underdog - perhaps he has always been the underdog - but so perfectly did he take the chance to finish his opponent with a defining head kick when the moment presented itself. It was emphatic and - to those who saw it - unforgettable.
That belief came from deep within Edwards. From days of hunger, days of desperation. Days of hardship and toil. Days that made him, but days that as a 31-year-old father, he will never wish or cannot even imagine for his offspring. Let's put the meat on the bones of his story: Leon, and his brother Fabian - also an MMA fighter with Bellator - spent their early lives in a one-room wooden shack with a zinc roof in a poor part of Kingston, Jamaica, with their mother and father where "hearing gunshots was normal".
"I was arrested a few times, for fights and having a knife. My mum had to come to the police station many times to get me out.
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