“Shoot, I was hoping it was coming. I’ve been busting my butt the last seven or eight years, training in MMA, and I always wanted to be in the UFC since I was nine years old, so it’s kind of surreal right now.”
Over twenty years is a long time to wait for anything. It’s even more rare to have the kind of clarity as a kid to know what you want to do for a living. But Saeteurn never wavered from those early conversations he had with his Uncle Johnny.
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“The reason why I started fighting and why I fell in love with it, with martial arts and MMA and the UFC and all that, is all because of my uncle,” he said. “If it wasn’t for him, I don’t know what I’d be doing right now. And it all started when I was nine years old. I remember one summer he hit me up and he taught me how to throw a football and taught me how to catch, and he was like, ‘Man, you want to start wrestling? I think you’d be good at it.’ I was like, yeah, let’s do that. And I tried to back out on him. I was like, I don’t know if I want to go on the day that we were supposed to go to practice. And he’s like, ‘Dude, just try it and if you don’t like it, then I won’t ask you to do it no more.’ And he talked me into it, and I’m glad that I took that leap of faith because my first practice, I’m like, this is the coolest f**king thing ever. And then a few weeks after that, I watched my first UFC fight with him and I’m like, yeah, that’s it. That’s what I know I want to do.”
He never turned back. At 23, he had his first amateur fight, and less than four years later, he made his pro debut in Urijah Faber’s A1 Combat promotion. Now he’s here, even if his grandparents don’t necessarily agree with his career path.
“My grandparents immigrated here after the Vietnam War, and they’re super traditional and super stuck in their ways,” said Saeteurn. “They’re like, ‘You’re wasting your time doing this. You need to go get a job and you need to start saving your money and don’t spend any money.’ But I know that they know that I love what I do. They just want me to be okay.”