many opportunities for him to fight in MMA that
made sense.
“I was 17 and really tall. I weighed about 95kg
[210lb/14stone] so I was big. The Nogueiras gave
me some supplements, money for the bus and
that was ‘what’s up’ because I never had money
from jiu jitsu before. I never knew about supple-
ments and when the guys got me that, I said I’m
gonna help them, and then I started to train with
them, only no-gi.
“I started to spar a lot and I thought, ‘man, I really
wanna do MMA’, so I changed gyms to only ded-
icate myself to MMA. MMA didn’t work because I
was too young and I was too heavy. I was big, but
I was still a kid. In Brazil you can’t compete like
an amateur; they only do professional. Guys only
do one amateur and then they do professional.
The Nogueiras were like, ‘you are gonna train for
sure, but for you to compete right now is kind of
tricky,” said Mahamed.
His BJJ coach suggested that he do BJJ tourna-
ments to quench his appetite for competition.
“My jiu jitsu instructor, Everaldo was like, ‘man, I
think you should fight some jiu jitsu tournaments
to get that adrenaline and have some competi-
tion experience,’ so I thought, ‘OK, man let’s do
that’. I did one tournament; I won and they pro-
moted me to purple belt. From there it was noth-
ing but jiu jitsu anymore. I forgot about MMA,”
said Mahamed.
Leaving Brazil
Mahamed comes from a home with modest
means, and he knew that staying in Brazil would
not be the best way for his grappling career to
flourish. When presented with an opportunity to
train in the USA, he jumped at the offer to train
at Team Lloyd Irvin. However, to get to Maryland,
Mahamed was going to need to earn some prize
money to afford his trip.
Mahamed recalls of his decision to leave Brazil, “I
had a nice relationship with Master Lloyd because
I met him at Worlds in 2013. He told me that if I
wanted to come I could, so I told him, I was going
to go to Abu Dhabi, I was going to win and then
I’d have money to go. I said we’d talk when I got
there, but I lost at Abu Dhabi. I’d never fought
open weight before, but I told him, ‘hey man I lost
today, but tomorrow I’m going to win the open
weight and then I’m going to have money to go’.
Then I went all the way to the finals, but lost there.
To me it was kind of crazy because I’d never done
an open weight before.”The money from the second place showing at
the Abu Dhabi open weight was enough for Ma-
hamed to purchase his air fare, and after training
for a month with Irvin’s team he won Worlds. This
was the beginning of his ongoing affiliation with
the Maryland-based team. Few figures are as po-
larizing in jiu jitsu as Lloyd Irvin. Love him or hate
him, it’s hard to deny the quality level of black belt
competitors he’s produced, such as DJ Jackson
and JT Torres. Mahamed was not aware of some
of the controversies outside of the mats that sur-
rounded Irvin and some of his former students.When asked if he knew about their tarnished rep-
utation and if his professors were OK with him
coming to TLI, Mahamed was very candid: “In
Brazil people don’t see it in the same way. They
were more like, ‘why are you going to an Ameri-
can school?’ People didn’t really know about the
reputation or anything like that, and most didn’t
know what happened. To be real, I don’t know
what happened because I never went to the In-
ternet to read about all that stuff.“FOR ME, IF I HAVE A GI, AND A TATAMI AND FOOD ON MY
TABLE, MAN, I’M HAPPY! SO FOR ME, OF COURSE THERE IS
ENOUGH MONEY IN JIU JITSU”