“My thing is; if the guy is cool with me, I don’t
have a reason to turn my back on him. I don’t know
what happened, and I don’t really care because
he’s cool with me and he’s opened his doors. That
was my position at that time. Then I came here
and saw how everyone is very close to each other
and they’re all friends. When they travel, they stay
together, they eat together, they do everything to-
gether, and I felt like that’s a real team. Then I liked
them; I mean those guys really fight for each other,
they like each other. I don’t really believe all what
people say and I don’t really care if it’s true or not,
then I came and I liked it so I just don’t think about
that anymore,” said Mahamed.
Mahamed chose to see past the controversies and
bonded with his new teammates, moving perma-
nently to Maryland as a purple belt. Living in a
new country presented some challenges at first
including getting acclimated to a new language,
culture and climate. He recalls of his first months
in Maryland, “In the beginning I was a purple belt
and [Irvin] helped me a lot. He supported me to
get where I am today. Today I do a lot of seminars.
I don’t do as much as I could because I want to
train, but every time I need, I talk to people and
they bring me to their school to do the seminars,
and I have a primary sponsor, Grips, so things are
starting to get good.
“The hardest thing about coming here is the cold,
I hate it. Every month it’s still bad, every month I
talk to Master Lloyd and I tell him I’m going to
leave, but then it gets hot again so I calm down. I
didn’t speak English when I first came, it was hard
because I had to learn, and I’m a perfectionist. If
I don’t do it perfect I get mad. I had to study, and
I had to learn English, so now it’s getting better.”
Becoming a Black Belt
Mahamed won IBJJF Worlds as a purple belt after
training at TLI for just a month. This reinforced his
belief that he was at the right place to develop
his game and excel in competition. When asked
about the difference in his abilities as a purple
belt first arriving to train in America, versus his
current skill set as a black belt, he explained, “I
do the same positions as before but I do them
better. I’m also smarter, stronger and faster.
“I think a purple belt is already good enough to
beat some black belts but don’t believe it at first
and also don’t have the strength and smarts, the
patience, to do it consistently. The hard thing
for me is patience. When I fight, I want to do
everything fast. I want to pull guard, sweep and
attack fast. The black belts know the right time to
attack, right time to rest, and that’s the biggest
difference, it’s getting better at being patient.”The ability to learn patience came with time and
was honed with ardent dedication to training,
which by Mahamed’s own admission, is pretty
much all he does or thinks about when not spend-
ing time with his girlfriend. Mahamed lives in Vir-
ginia, about 45 minutes away from TLI’s academy
in Maryland, and takes the 90-minute trip to his
academy often twice a day.“I wake up in the morning, have breakfast and
go to the gym. I drill or train for like two hours
depending on the day. If it’s before a big tourna-
ment it’s hard practice. If it isn’t, then a drill and
a regular training with some sparring. Then I go
back home, eat and rest a little bit. If I have en-
ergy, depending on the day, I’ll do conditioning
from 6-7 and then I’ll go to the evening class.
Normally it’s two training sessions; one jiu jitsu,
then another jiu jitsu or another conditioning, two
hours each,” said Mahamed.The constant high-level training with a group of
skilled partners led Mahamed to increasing suc-
cess. He won multiple world titles at the lower
belt levels, including IBJJF Worlds as a brown
belt, the American Nationals Championship, and
placing second at ADCC. As the medals began
piling up so did the praise and, eventually, he
received the ultimate recognition when he was
awarded the rank of black belt from his instructor
in September of 2015.Although the belt didn’t confer any super-powers,
it has given Mahamed some perspective on a stu-
dent’s journey from white to black belt. He noted,
“Everything changed when I got my black belt.
My technique, my body, my mind, my self-belief
all changed. Right now, I’m a man. I used to be a
15-year-old kid dreaming about life, but not know-
ing what I should or could do to do my thing. I didn’t
know if I was good enough to be an athlete, then
one day I looked in the mirror and I was an athlete.“The more I learned, the more I saw that I was
going to learn more. As a blue belt and a purple
belt sometimes you think ‘I got it, I know that s**t
already,’ but when you get to black belt you figure
out that you don’t know anything and you need
to train more. You realise you’ll never be able to
learn everything and that’s beautiful. I like that.“MMA DIDN’T WORK
BECAUSE I WAS
TOO YOUNG AND I
WAS TOO HEAVY. I
WAS BIG, BUT I WAS
STILL A KID”