There are not many people who have had the opportunity to see the fight game from as many different angles as I have.
I have been an athlete. I have coached fighters. I have wrapped hands, worked corners and helped athletes through the early stages of managing their careers. I have organized MMA events myself. I have worked with promoters. I have been part of the grassroots development of the sport in a country where, when we started, almost nobody knew what mixed martial arts was.
And then there was ONE Championship.
My relationship with ONE eventually took me almost completely around the circle. I was part of its early network of partners. I attended its early summits and later spoke at one. I brought athletes to ONE as a coach and cornerman. I competed inside the ONE cage myself. I organized events in Pakistan connected to that growing Asian MMA ecosystem. I developed friendships with people working behind the scenes.
And eventually, I became the first ONE Championship athlete to make the transition into an executive role within the company.
It gave me something that I did not fully appreciate at the time: a 360-degree view of professional martial arts.
But the story actually begins before ONE Championship existed.
Before ONE
Before ONE, there was Martial Combat.
Martial Combat was a Singapore-based MMA promotion that, looking back, almost feels like a pilot project for what would eventually become ONE Championship. Some of the people who would become very familiar names in the ONE universe were already there. Eduard Folayang and the Team Lakay crew were there. Fighters from Evolve were there. Mitch Chilson was fighting.
And I was watching.
At that point, I was still relatively new to martial arts. I had started training in my mid-twenties, which is incredibly late by the standards of professional combat sports. But because I was new, I probably also had the confidence—or stupidity—that comes from not yet knowing exactly how difficult something is.
I remember watching those guys and thinking that I wasn’t that far away.
I wanted to fight at that level.
Then ONE Championship launched.
I can still remember watching one of those first events at my home in Lahore, Pakistan. I wasn’t sitting in some glamorous media room or surrounded by people from the fight industry. I was sitting in the little quarters where my driver lived at my house, watching the show with him.
The room was simple. Pakistan barely had an MMA scene at the time. The people around me had very little concept of what this sport could become.
“I’m going to fight there.”
At the time, that was just a statement of belief.
Two years later, I did.
In April 2013, I walked into the Singapore Indoor Stadium and competed at ONE FC 8.
There is something strange about accomplishing something you once watched from very far away. The cage doesn’t look quite the same when you are standing inside it.
But fighting for ONE turned out to be only one part of my relationship with the organization.
Seeing the Fight Game From Different Corners
Even before becoming an employee, my relationship with ONE was never simply that of a fighter showing up, competing and going home.
I was already building MMA in Pakistan.
We had created a martial arts community essentially from scratch. I was involved with PAKMMA and organized events such as Pak Fight Club. We were trying to build fighters, coaches, gyms and an actual ecosystem around a sport that hardly existed in the country when we began.
That work connected me to the wider Asian MMA community.
I became involved with the early ONE network. I was invited to the company’s early summits and eventually became a speaker at one of them. I began meeting the people who were trying to build martial arts throughout Asia—the gym owners, coaches, promoters, fighters and entrepreneurs who were all doing variations of what we were attempting to do in Pakistan.
I also began bringing fighters to ONE.
Sometimes I was the athlete.
Sometimes I was the coach.
Sometimes I was the cornerman.
Sometimes I was helping someone negotiate the confusing early stages of becoming a professional fighter.
Those roles matter because a fight event looks very different depending on which side of the curtain you are standing on.
A fan sees the fight.
A fighter sees the opponent, the weight cut, the locker room, the walkout and the result.
A coach sees an entirely different fight.
A promoter sees something else again.
I eventually got to see all of them.
And somewhere along the way, the people working at ONE stopped simply being people who worked for a promotion I fought for. They became friends.
That would eventually change my life.
A Conversation I Barely Remember Having
One of the funniest parts of this story involves Victor Cui.
Victor was ONE Championship’s President in those early years and had a very visible presence around the organization. This was before Chatri Sityodtong became as publicly associated with ONE as he later would be, so for many of us dealing with the organization in those days, Victor was one of its most recognizable faces.
I was fighting in Malaysia.
Anyone who has cut substantial weight for a fight knows that the last stages can put you into a strange mental state. You haven’t eaten properly. You’re dehydrated. You’re tired. Your brain isn’t working at 100 percent.
My cornerman for that fight was having problems entering Malaysia.
And the cornerman was, wonderfully enough, the same man who had been my driver in Pakistan—the man who had sat with me in that little room in Lahore years earlier while I watched ONE and said that one day I was going to fight there.
Now I was fighting there, and he was coming to corner me.
Except he couldn’t get into the country.
So while I was exhausted and cutting weight, I was also staying awake, trying to sort out his situation and eventually going to the airport to get him.
Somewhere during that haze of dehydration, lack of food and lack of sleep, I ran into Victor.
“Victor, one day I’d really love to work here.”
I meant it.
But it wasn’t a plan.
I hadn’t plotted some transition from fighter to executive. There wasn’t a five-year career strategy behind the statement. I was a fighter cutting weight who was probably slightly delirious, and I blurted out something I had been thinking.
Then life continued.
I fought.
I trained.
I coached.
I went back to Pakistan.
And some time later, Victor said something to me that I hadn’t really expected:
“How would you feel about working for ONE Championship?”
My reaction was basically: Yeah. That would be pretty awesome.
But saying yes in theory and actually giving up being a fighter were two very different things.
Meeting “The Wizard”
There was another person involved in those conversations who would have an enormous influence on what happened next: Matt Hume.
Matt is one of those people whose reputation inside MMA is difficult to explain to someone who only casually follows the sport.
They call him “The Wizard” for a reason.
He has spent decades studying fighting at the highest level—as a fighter, coach, strategist and matchmaker—and some of the greatest martial artists of their generation have trusted his judgment.
As the possibility of working for ONE became more serious, I also had another fight coming up.
For the final portion of my training camp, I went to AMC Pankration in Washington State, Matt’s gym and one of the oldest MMA gyms in the United States.
There I trained alongside Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson.
At the time, Demetrious was in the middle of one of the greatest runs the sport had ever seen. For a guy who had started martial arts in his mid-twenties in Pakistan, getting ready for a ONE Championship fight while training in that room was itself a remarkable place to have ended up.
But looking back, I think that training camp may also have been a little bit of a job interview.
Matt was watching me. Not simply as a fighter.
He was getting to know how I thought, how I worked and perhaps what I might be capable of doing outside the cage.
Eventually, the conversation became more direct.
ONE wanted me to come work for the company.
And I hesitated.
The Second Death of an Athlete
People sometimes imagine that athletes retire because they no longer want to compete. For many of us, that isn’t what happens at all.
I still wanted to fight.
When Matt spoke to me seriously about joining ONE, one of my immediate questions was essentially: What about my fighting career?
I was approaching 35.
But athletes are remarkably good at negotiating with reality.
Maybe there was another run.
Maybe I could put together a few wins.
Maybe I could get myself closer to a title shot.
Maybe I hadn’t seen the best version of myself yet.
Matt gave me an answer that was kind, but brutally direct.
He essentially told me that I was not the same type of athlete as some of the elite fighters around me. I didn’t have their explosiveness. I didn’t have the same level of pure athletic ability. I hadn’t spent my childhood wrestling or accumulated an enormous amateur background before turning professional.
And financially, he told me something equally straightforward: I probably wasn’t going to make that much money fighting.
That was tough to hear. Especially from Matt Hume.
When somebody without much knowledge tells you that you aren’t going to reach the top, it is easy to dismiss them. When someone with Matt’s experience tells you, you listen.
And the hardest part was that somewhere in the back of my mind, I already knew he was probably right.
I had started martial arts late. At the point when these conversations were becoming serious, my professional record was 3–3. I wasn’t sitting one fight away from a world championship opportunity. I wasn’t a former Olympic wrestler or a lifelong combat-sports prodigy who simply needed another couple of years to put everything together.
I was almost 35 years old.
How much longer was I realistically going to fight? Another year? Two? Three? And then what?
Here was an opportunity to move inside one of the organizations that was shaping the future of martial arts in Asia. If I let that opportunity go by because I couldn’t admit that my athletic career had a ceiling, would an opportunity like it ever come again?
That is a difficult conversation for an athlete to have with himself. Your brain can understand something before your identity is willing to accept it.
For years, my days had revolved around training sessions and my life had been divided into training camps. Being a fighter wasn’t simply something I did. It was who I was.
Walking away from that felt like giving up a part of myself.
But eventually I made the decision.
I took the job.
Going Behind the Curtain
In August 2017, I officially joined ONE Championship as an executive.
I was the first athlete from the ONE roster to make that transition into the company’s management.
Suddenly the organization I had watched from Pakistan, dreamed about fighting for, competed inside, coached athletes in and developed friendships around became my workplace.
And almost immediately I realized something.
I had spent years in the fight game. I had promoted events. I had coached. I had fought. I had dealt with managers and fighters and promoters. I thought I understood professional MMA.
I didn’t.
I understood the parts that had been visible from where I was standing.
Once I went behind the curtain, I began to see the machine.
Matchmaking. Athlete contracts. Fighter relations. Event operations. Travel. Medical issues. Weight problems. Managers. Coaches. Broadcast requirements. Last-minute cancellations. Personalities. Politics. Business considerations. Hundreds of decisions that fighters and fans never know are being made.
For the first time, I could see why things happened that once made absolutely no sense to me as an athlete.
I also began meeting people I had admired from a distance: legends, world champions, coaches who had shaped the sport, and executives who were trying to build something that had never existed in Asia on that scale before.
Later I would travel across the region looking for fighters. I would become a matchmaker for Rich Franklin’s ONE Warrior Series. I would watch unknown prospects walk into rooms hoping somebody would notice them, and I would eventually have a small part in the early careers of athletes who would become some of the biggest names in martial arts.
I saw extraordinary people do extraordinary things. I formed friendships that I expect will last for the rest of my life.
I also learned that the fight business is exactly that: a fight business.
There is the martial arts part of it—the discipline, courage, sacrifice and honor that drew so many of us into this world.
And then there is the business part.
Money. Careers. Ambition. Ego. Loyalty. Relationships. Opportunity. Power.
Sometimes those two worlds fit together beautifully. Sometimes they don’t. Over the years that followed, I would see both.
I am grateful for my years at ONE Championship. The experience taught me things about martial arts, athletes, business and people that I could never have learned simply by remaining a fighter.
But it also changed the way I looked at the fight game forever.
Years earlier, sitting in a small concrete room in Lahore with my driver, I had looked at ONE Championship on a television screen and said: I’m going to fight there.
I did.
Then that same driver eventually stood in my corner while I fought for the organization.
And somewhere along that journey, while half-delirious from cutting weight, I told the President of ONE that I would love to work there someday.
I did that too.
I just had no idea what I was asking for.
Because becoming an executive meant walking through a door that most fighters never get to walk through. For years I had watched the show from the audience, from the corner and from inside the cage. Now I was behind the curtain.
And like Dorothy pulling back the curtain in The Wizard of Oz, I was finally going to see how everything actually worked.
What I found there would be an education.