theMIXEDbusiness

This isn’t really the beginning, even though it is to you. I’ve been training for about 6 months, but stopped recently due to the birth of my first child (thanks). It’s been a great experience so far (MMA and the baby). My first couple of posts will cover the beginning of my journey and catch you up to where I’m at today. Let me start by telling you a bit about myself and why I decided to try to make it as an MMA (mixed martial arts) fighter.

First of all, my name is Garen Bagdasarian and I’m 20 years old. I’m originally from Armenia but currently live in Utah. Yeah, I’m not sure how I ended up here either. Before I lived in Utah, I lived in Queens, New York for five years. I’m not sure what that has to do with anything, but if nothing else, it should make you think I’m tough. I have a background in Shotokai and I’ve been taking karate classes for most of my life. Karate runs in my family; my uncles are both black belts in their respective styles and they operate a dojo in Nyireghaza, Hungary, where all my cousins train. The last time I had trained was probably about 5 years ago. Since then, my only exercise was basketball. But that just wasn’t enough. About 8 months ago I realized I was feeling incomplete. I realized that I needed more competition in my life; more adrenaline. And after I saw a video of my cousin beating some kid’s ass in Hungary (the kid was bigger, older, and challenged him), I knew what I wanted to do.

I wanted to fight.

I had been a fan of the UFC and mixed martial arts in general for a while, and I had been watching every event. Soon, as I began to gain more interest, I started downloading (yup, I download torrents) all the past events from different organizations. I was watching Vale Tudo, Pride, SHOOTO, early UFC, King of the Cage, Elite XC, etc. I enjoyed watching the fights immensely and felt a need to finally get off my ass and get involved. Luckily, my mom met a co-worker that had a background in MMA and taught classes. When she told me about this, I was excited as hell! I was ready to start.

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 4:29 am and is filed under Mixed Martial Arts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.