Fear Is My Friend

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When I was a little kid growing up in Batistini, in São Bernardo do Campo, I was afraid of the dark.

Seriously, guys. No joke. Just stick with me. I am not bullshitting.

I was terrified of the dark.

And not just as a very young child, either. I’m talking all the way up until I was 10 or 11 years old. 

My parents were there, in our tiny, little house each night, and all of my seven brothers and sisters. So I was safe. But I would still be afraid when the darkness hit. Not really of the dark itself … it was more about not knowing what might happen to me, not being able to be in control of my surroundings. I remember sometimes I would even pee in the bed because I would be afraid to get up and go to the bathroom in the dark. That’s how much it affected me.

I was just a scared little kid, you know what I mean? Laugh at me if you want to. But that’s real. It’s just the way it was back then.

Of course, as I got older, that fear of the dark, it gradually went away. But the idea behind it, of always wanting to be in control of my situation? That never left. And the path I took to becoming a fighter actually ties into it. As a little kid, I was never one to follow the crowd. I didn’t want to run around playing games all day, or to spend all my time reading big stacks of books. I wanted to choose my own way, to be in control. 

So, for example, where I come from, in Brazil, everyone plays football. If you’re a boy and don’t play football — don’t love football — people will look at you and think something is wrong with you.

Well, I was that kid growing up.

I never wanted to play. So I didn’t.

But, at the same time … holding out completely? In my country? That’s literally impossible, you know? It is impossible to resist, over and over again, when people are constantly asking you to play. When they are begging you to play. So eventually you give in. And the one time I gave in as a kid was this time when I was a teenager and a group of guys in the neighborhood talked me into joining a game. I told them no. But they somehow convinced me.  

When the game started … it wasn’t pretty. I was already big back then, basically the same height I am now, but I was skinny, and I wasn’t as skilled as the other players. So I was basically just running around trying to get the ball. And, I’ll never forget it, there was this one guy on the other team who I kept battling. Big guy, older. He was 25 or 26, and he was a butcher. One of those butchers from back when things were different and guys used to carry big cuts of meat on their backs. Very, very strong.

So me and this butcher, we kept battling for the ball all game. We knocked each other down a few times, nothing too serious. But then, at one point, he stole the ball from me and I tried to get it back from him, and when I ran into him, he fell.

He had reached a breaking point, I guess, because he kicked me hard in the thigh, and then he got up to hit me.

I was nervous at first, because of how big he was. But I was also mad that he was trying to swing at me … so I started swinging at him. We pushed and shoved each other, and all the other players ran over to separate us. A few seconds later, the butcher had calmed down. But me? 

No way.

I wanted more. Chama!

So even after they let the butcher free, they all still had to hold me back. For like 10 minutes. Maybe more. 

The whole time, I’m like: “Let me go. Let me go! I want to hit him!!”

And then, at one point, the butcher, he looks over and he curses at me. “Let him go,” he says. “Let him see what happens.”

Bad move.

The guys, they let go of me. And as soon as I got free, I went over to the butcher, and I punched him in the face. 

The other players, they couldn’t believe it. He was much bigger, and stronger, and older than me. But it didn’t matter. I wasn’t going to back down from that guy. 

To this day, I still remember how the people there, they just had these blank looks. Surprised. And then they were like, “Hey, um … maybe you should go to the gym. Learn to fight for real.”

I just looked at them. Stone face. Didn’t really answer. It was like….

“I told you guys I didn’t want to play football.”

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One of the big reasons why I wasn’t running around playing sports as a kid was that I was always busy working. Like at a real job. Starting from when I was 12.

It’s the same reason I never watched much TV, or saw many movies, or listened to music, or anything like that.

As a very young child, I would play Fubeca with marbles in the street, or wrestle around with my buddies, or sometimes play video games. But starting at 12, I began living an adult life. I became a worker. I needed to. Our town was not very wealthy, it is a humble place, and my mom and dad didn’t have much money. They were always working, but we never had a lot. I remember not wanting to burden them by asking for things they couldn’t afford. I wanted to pay for things myself.

Even at around 8 or 9 years old, I would do yard work for spare change, or sell snacks out in front of restaurants. Sometimes I’d wash car parts at a local mechanic’s place in São Bernardo. Or me and my brother would go out into the woods and cut down chuchu or bamboo to sell. Then, when I turned 12, there was this rubber mill right near our house where me and my brothers would go and mess around … and one of the workers I knew there bought his own rubber mill in a nearby town. As soon as I heard that, I started begging him to give me a real job.

“No, no,” he’d always say. “I don’t have anything for you.” So I’d wait a week, and ask again. “Still no. Sorry.”

But then, one day, he calls me up. He says I can come by the tire shop he ran there, and that he would think about letting me help out. Before I knew it, he was teaching me how to calibrate tires for the people who would drive up. I’d get R$1 each time as a tip. And the boss, he didn’t even have to pay me! A few weeks later, he fully hired me to work with him for R$5 a day while I was going to school — half a period, early in the morning.

I remember, on my first official day he offered me R$5 to remove an air chamber that got stuck to the inside of a tire. This is a very difficult thing to do. (People who work on tires know this. The rubber gets very hot doing it, and when the tire heats up the glue makes it stick. It can be dangerous. And you have to be very strong to do it.) But I say OK, and then my boss leaves for a few minutes. I immediately muscle out the air chamber on my first try and head directly to the snack bar. When he came back, he couldn’t believe it. I was just a kid. He didn’t think he was going to have to pay up. But on that day, I showed him I could handle the job.

The place opened at seven in the morning, so I would get up early, hop on a bike, and ride 15 minutes to get there. On days when I didn’t have a bike, it’d be a 40-minute walk. There would already be trucks waiting when I arrived.

I’d be working on tires all morning, using big tools. Almost always without anyone helping. Just a skinny little boy doing the work. I absolutely hated school, so I loved being able to be at the shop for part of the day instead of studying. Then, when there wasn’t any school, I would basically just work all day. And if I finished my work early, I wouldn’t go home. I would just stay at the shop chatting or playing dominoes until it was late, 10 or 11 at night.

That’s how I started with the drinking.

There was a bar right next to the shop. And another one 30 meters down the road that had really good cachaça. Another one, about 100 meters away, had sinuca. One on a nearby street had colder beers than the others.

Everyone I worked with went to those bars when the day was done. So I didn’t even really think about it back then, to be honest with you, even though I was only 12. I just kind of went along with everybody else and did what all the workers did.  

At first, I liked cachaça best, so I started drinking a little bit of that on work days. Then, from there, it’s a bit of a blur how it got to be more and more over my teenage years. It was the routine, the environment, I guess you could say.

By the time I was 16, it had gotten pretty bad. I remember, usually when I would calibrate a tire, the person would give me a tip. But sometimes people would not give one, and instead they would say “I left you a drink at the bar.” And so … what can you do, right? I would go and drink the drink.

More and more, I was finding reasons to drink. It was gradual, and you might not have noticed if you weren’t paying close attention, but I could tell.

And it was like there was nothing I could do about it.

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A day or so after I punched the butcher on the pitch, I decided to take matters into my own hands and meet up with this trainer everyone called Master Ninja.

He was working with guys at this little gym right near my house. Basically a wooden shack, nothing fancy at all. I was 18 or so at the time, and getting stronger, and had just pummeled a grown man for swearing at me, so I figured maybe I should go and see what this guy was all about. Here is pretty much how our first conversation went:

“Ninja, I want to fight. Like in the movies. Can you teach me?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“You do not want to fight. You want to train.”

“No, no … I want to fight!”

Then he just shook his head slowly from side to side. He stared at me.

“You see those guys over there?” he said, pointing to the ring. “They are training. They are working. They want to be great, to be the best. So they are training. They are learning. Learning how to fight.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. I literally just wanted to fight people. But he told me that there was going to be a Chinese boxing competition, a local championship, in 30 days. And he said that was why the guys he had pointed to were working so hard.

“Well,” I told him, “then I want to fight in that championship!”

Chama!

He just looked at me and kept repeating the word training, telling me that I couldn’t just walk into a competition without doing any work. So I gave the ninja some of my tire shop pay to train with him for 30 days, and I paid for the pants and shirt that he made you buy. I went to the gym each day and did what he told me to do. Then, 30 days later, I showed up at the competition in São Paulo and fought against this guy who had been training for a long time. It was a guy everybody there knew.

This was the last fight of the event. And on that day, everyone from our gym lost….

Everyone but me.

They raised my hand as the champion.

That night, I felt like a king.

But when I woke up the next morning?

I felt like I was going to die! Maaaan, let me tell you: That guy beat the hell out of me. My legs, my arms, everything ached. I might have won, but he hurt me bad.

So … I quit.

It was like: No thanks. That’s all for me. I’ve seen enough.

I trained and fought and won … and now I am retired!

One fight.

The end.

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For the next three years, all I did was drink.

No fighting. No sports at all, actually. No training. Just drinking. Three straight years of alcohol.

I started to really worry at one point because I noticed that the drinking … it was getting in the way of my overall life. I am a very disciplined person. It is my nature. It’s part of who I am. But because of the drinking I was always showing up late to places. Or making mistakes when I wouldn’t have before. It bothered me a lot.

Eventually, years into a situation where that had become my every day, I was trying to figure out what to do, and for whatever reason I thought about fighting again. Not to make money, or to make a living. Like, as a way out.

As a way to stop drinking. 

The first thing I did was go back to see the ninja. He was at a new gym then, a bigger place, and when I showed up, I remember it was a sparring day. I hadn’t worked out at all, but there were these two big guys at the gym who had been training with him, and I asked if I could fight them. The ninja told me I’d need to train before I did that — “Training, you must always be training!” — but I did it anyway.

And I beat them both.

Fresh off the street, walk into the place, and I beat his two best guys.

The ninja kind of raised an eyebrow at that. But also, of course, it was like: “Imagine what you could do if you were traaaaaaaaaining!!!!” 

Then, the next week, sparring day rolls around, and those two guys … I don’t see them anywhere. The ninja comes over to me and tells me they didn’t show up. And it was the same thing the following week, too. They basically didn’t want to fight with me after that first time. They just disappeared.

“I need to take you somewhere else,” the ninja told me then. “Where people will not be afraid to fight you. To someone who can help you get better.” And that’s how I met my first true coach, Belocqua Wera. (He is the one who gave me the nickname Poatan and helped me get in touch with my indigenous ancestry. Helped me connect more with my heritage and my spiritual side.)

When I got to Belocqua’s gym, it was a familiar story at first. There was a guy training there who was the amateur kickboxing champion of Paulista, and Belocqua had me fight that guy immediately, like as a test, on the very first day. He gave me the clothes I had to wear, taped me up, and then I went in and … I held my own. The other guy had more technical skill, but I gave him a good fight. Then, the next week, that guy, same thing … he was nowhere to be found.

From there, Belocqua devoted so much energy to me. He got me a scholarship to train at the best gym in São Paulo. He passed along all his knowledge and experience. He put everything he had into turning me from a big strong guy into a fighter.

I was training constantly then. Getting better and better at kickboxing. But I was still drinking. A lot. And I knew it was holding me back from being my best. I kept telling myself I needed to stop. But if I’m being truly honest, at that point, I didn’t really want to stop. I just wanted to be able to control it. You know what I mean?

I remember I tried three times to stop. The first time, I said I was going to quit for 30 days. And I did! I made it to the end. So I basically convinced myself that I could control my drinking. And that made things even worse. When that 30th day came, I drank like never before. Way more than before. Then a year or so later I said: “OK, I am going to quit for three months now!” And again, I did it. I made it to the end. But just like the last time, when three months hit … I drank enough for three months just in that one day.

This was all while I was training and trying to get better as a fighter. But the drinking, it just kept getting worse. At one point, I said: “Six months now! No drink for six months!!!” Same thing happened at the end, more drinking, just like before.

I had already won some amateur championships in kickboxing by that point. I was beating everyone. Starting to make a name for myself. But that last time I tried to stop, I remember going back to the alcohol again after six months, and having to do a fight against Jason Wilnis. It was in São Paulo, and I lost.

I was 25 by then. And strong. A good fighter. But after I lost that fight, I understood that if I didn’t stop drinking, I was going to lose a lot more.    

And I hate losing.

I hate losing, and I hate not being in control.

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I stopped for good when I was 26 years old. 

No medicines. No rehab. No long talks with psychologists.

I did a lot of work. It was hard. I had to put in work on myself.

But as much as I did that, and wanted to change, and tried to put in the effort, it wasn’t enough. That alone wouldn’t do it. 

Honestly, you wanna know what it was?

It was the people who loved me. And wanting to make them proud of me.

I remember, all those times when I would stop drinking for a month or two, I would always go to my mom right away and tell her that I did what I said, that I had accomplished my goal. Like….

“Mom, guess what. I did it!”

Every time, I would say that.

“Mom, six months! Can you believe it? I quit!”

And what she said to me the last time, that third time … it really hit me hard. She looked me dead in the eye, real serious, and she told me….

“This is what you said the other times, too.”

That ripped my heart out of my chest. Just hearing her say that. 

You could tell that she didn’t believe. That I had done things to make it so she didn’t believe it was going to last. I hated knowing that I made it so she couldn’t trust me.

I wanted more than anything to change things, to be serious about it. To take control of it. I wanted her to believe in me. So I fully dedicated myself after she said that.

I’d go out, and be with friends, and she’d see me after and realize that I hadn’t been drinking. She saw that it wasn’t the same old thing. That it wasn’t just like all those other times anymore. And it was the same with a bunch of other family members and friends. People who cared about me, they were noticing. It was like, “Wow, did Alex really stop drinking?” or “Alex seems like he turned a corner, right?”

It felt so good to hear those things. To know that people were starting to believe in me. And that made me want to keep doing what I said. It made me more responsible.

I couldn’t let it happen again where someone would ask my mom about me and she would have to say: “Well, yeah, about that … he went back to his old ways. It’s just the same thing all over again.”

I was afraid to let my people down again. I couldn’t do that anymore. So I stopped.

And now, here we are, 11 years later.

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I didn’t stop drinking so I could eventually have a chance to become a world champion. But I can tell you for sure that … there is no way I could’ve gotten to where I am today if I had stayed on the path I was on.

After doing traditional boxing for a while, and then spending so much time in kickboxing … going into MMA, with UFC, it’s just totally different. Like 10 levels up. I could box, and kickbox, I could do that and win lots of fights and still be drinking all the time. Not that I should do that, but I could.

This, though? I couldn’t do this, at this level, if I was like I was back then. It is too hard. Everyone is too good. If you are not focused, not disciplined, you are going to get hurt. Or maybe worse.

Sometimes I can’t even believe this is actually what we’re doing, you know what I mean? It’s funny, there are some moments when I will be at an event, working with a fighter, in his corner and … this is difficult to describe, or put words to, but sometimes I will look at fighters heading into the octagon, and in my mind I am thinking: What the hell are they doing? These guys are crazy. They are broken people. They are going to kill each other.

It’s like I’m on the ceiling looking down, or I am a fly buzzing around seeing everything, rather than someone who fights for a living himself.

Then, it’s like someone clicks their fingers, and I snap out of it, and I come back to Earth, and I realize….

That is YOU, man!

It hits me every single time.

You are that person, too! 

It’s like: If those guys are crazy, if they are broken….

Then what does that make you?

But yeah, when I went from kickboxing to MMA, I could tell right away that it was a completely different level. And, I gotta say: I owe a lot to Izzy Adesanya, I’m not gonna lie. That guy, I mean … God bless him.

Before UFC, before he became a champion, we would fight in kickboxing. And he was very good, very skilled. But I beat him both times we fought, once in China in 2016 and then again in São Paulo in 2017 with a knockout.

At the time, I had no idea what he was going to become. I just knew that I had beaten him. Then, three years later, when I was having conversations with UFC about coming over from Glory, he’s middleweight champion and he does a video talking about me. He calls me a nobody. Says I am just some guy at a bar talking shit about how I used to be good at kickboxing, and that’s all I’ll ever be.

That video, it was like lighting a fuse. 

It motivated me so much. I wasn’t sure at the time that I’d end up winning a lot of UFC fights, or that I’d become a champion, but I absolutely knew that I was not going to end up being that guy he said I would be for the rest of my life.

What he said … it just made it even more likely that I would be successful at UFC. And the buzz that video got allowed more people to know who I was right away. It made it so that I could move up the ladder fast.  

Once I got there, I knew I could be a champion at UFC.

I knew I had what it takes. And it was definitely about more than just being big or strong or fast. About more than just … traaaaaaaaining!!! An important part of what has allowed me to become a champion is that I still have that same fear inside me that was there when I was a little kid back in Batistini. It’s not a fear of the dark anymore, but it is still a fear about not being taken by surprise or putting myself in a situation that I cannot control.

I am afraid of getting hit. Of being hurt during a fight. And I believe that it helps me to have that fear. That fear, it is my friend.

Because if you’re afraid, you know that there’s energy there, a focus. If you’re afraid, you’re not going to get shocked.

On the other hand, if you are not afraid of getting hit, I can tell you this for sure: You are going to get hit. Hard. And before you know it, that will be it. Because you are complacent.

That is not me. I am never complacent.

I am very afraid of being knocked out. I have no problem telling you that. Laugh if you want to. That’s just real.

But the key is … that fear? I know how to control it.

It’s all about being in control. That’s the most important part.

Some people, when they get afraid, they panic, or they lose their senses. That is very dangerous. It can make things a lot worse. That is not me. With me, it is the opposite. I know my mind and body well enough to know that any fear I am feeling is normal. That it can be used to help me be at my best. It allows me to better defend myself and to keep my focus, and to stay in total control of my situation.

That’s what you saw in that fight last year against Jamahal Hill. That’s what all the waving off Herb Dean stuff was about, if you want to get right down to it.

If you go back and watch it again, you will see that I never even looked at the referee’s hand when he came in after that kick went low. I couldn’t look. Wouldn’t.

I did not want to risk something unexpected coming from my opponent if I looked away. I did not want to potentially put myself in a bad spot. (Just like walking around the house in the dark as a kid. No thank you!)

I noticed that Herb was going to stop us, but that was not what I wanted. I was not in a great amount of pain. I didn’t need to stop, or time to recover. So why should we stop? It was the beginning of the fight. I had my strategy. I was in control. I knew what I needed to do, and I was putting pressure on him.

Why would I give away that control?

Why would I allow my opponent to get a rest, or a chance to think more? Maybe that would give him time to go back and adjust things. The control then shifts away from me and into his favor.

No thank you.

The reason why I knocked Jamahal out right after that is not because I am strong. Or because I know how to set up and land a punch. And it isn’t because of some spirits or special energy or voodoo power, or whatever some people say about me. It was because of my fear, and my focus, and never wanting to give up control.

That is what allows me to do what I do at this level.

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All these years later, it’s crazy to think about how far I have come since I was a kid. About the tiny, little house in São Bernardo do Campo, and the corner bars with the good cachaça, and the Master Ninja, and on and on. It is wild knowing that if it wasn’t for that one game of neighborhood football 20 years ago, I probably wouldn’t even be a fighter at all, much less a world champion.

In fact, if it wasn’t for that game, I’m pretty sure I’d still be back at the shop calibrating tires all day.

But do you want to hear something funny? A few years ago, soon after I came to UFC, I went back home and visited that tire shop. Just to catch up with everyone and reminisce for a bit. So I’m sitting out front chatting, sharing memories from the past, bullshitting with the guys. And, as we’re doing that, this car pulls up.

Random car, nothing too fancy.

A guy gets out with a bike helmet on. He’s got the little shorts. And the tight shirt. The whole outfit. He takes down his bike, and walks over to the pump, and he starts filling up the tires with air.

We don’t think anything of it.

But then, I’m looking at this guy … and something about him is making me look again. Look closer. Something about him is familiar. But I can’t put my finger on it. So I keep looking — like tilting my head to the side, squinting my eyes, really trying to figure out where I know this guy from.

And, of course, because I’m doing that … now he starts looking at me.

It’s like something out of a movie.

We’d look away, but then it’d be like … me looking at him, and then him looking at me, over and over.

It was driving me crazy. Like….

Who is this person?!?!? I swear I know him from somewhere. Who is he?!?!?

Then, finally, after what seemed like forever, it hit me.

THE FUCKING BUTCHER!

Hahahahahah.

I looked again just to make sure, and yep, it was him. That asshole who made me punch him in the face two decades ago during a football match that I told all those guys I didn’t want to play in. It was definitely him. 

In the flesh.

So at that point it’s like: What do I do now????

I thought for a second, and then I knew exactly what I had to do. I calmly walked over to the guy, and in a flash, before he even knew what was coming….

I knocked his ass out.

No, just kidding. Hahahahah. Sorry, sorry. You know you were thinking it, though.

No, for real, I just walked over to him and was like: “Um, excuse me … this is gonna sound really weird, but might you be the guy that I punched one time playing football like 20 years ago?”

And the guy, he stays silent for a second, and then he tilts his head to the side a bit and looks at me and is like….

“You know what? I think I am. I think I am the guy who you punched back then.”

I laughed so hard when he said that. And the butcher … he laughed too. It was actually pretty fucking great. There was no malice at all. No hard feelings. We both just kind of shook our heads and laughed together. 

Then, before he took his bike and left, I told him: “Thank you.”

Who knows if he understood why. And I never in my life would have imagined I’d be saying those words to that guy, of all people. But, if it wasn’t for him, I mean … who knows, right? Who knows where I am today. So yeah, you know what, God bless The Butcher! God bless that guy for real.   

Chama!

Alex