If nothing else, MMA is a sport with no shortage of extremes. There are freak athletes, physics-defying displays of violence and stories of calamitous misfortune playing out alongside those of the heart-warming, rags-to-riches variety.
Jorge Masvidal’s tale is one of the latter, an “overnight” success 17 years in the making who came out of nowhere to become a breakout star in 2019 after years toiling as a talented-but-overlooked fixture on the Ultimate Fighting Championship’s lightweight and welterweight rosters. He will fight for the undisputed 170-pound title in the UFC 251 main event on Saturday, as he looks to enter combat sports immortality by taking out Kamaru Usman on seven days’ notice.
A truncated version of the “Gamebred” career biography has been written many times over in the past 15 months, and it’s a story that lends itself to re-telling.
You can read the rest of this article at Sherdog.com.
Jacob Debets 