Jorge Masvidal was a street fighter, reality TV star then ‘beat the f***’ out of Nate Diaz and says he is ‘...

Sat in a McDonald’s drive-through in Miami, Jorge Masvidal listened intently to the powerful voice of the late, great Kimbo Slice.

The 18-year-old was invited to drive to the other side of his native Miami to face Slice’s protégé on that fateful day in 2004, a feared street fighter known as Ray, in just a few hours’ time.

After polishing off the reminder of his hamburger, ‘Gamebred’ set off to the backyard brawl unaware his journey would lead him to fight on the other side of the world under the brightest of lights.

It is perhaps fitting the former street fighter earned his first ever UFC title fight on a week’s notice on ‘Fight Island’ against one of the most dominant champions in the sport.

Masvidal’s bout at UFC 251 against Kamaru Usman drew some of the biggest pay-per-view numbers for the UFC in 2020 – almost as much as Conor McGregor’s return in January.

Twice he has tried to take the belt from Usman and twice he has failed and now, in his first fight since the title fight at UFC 261 in 2021, he returns for a grudge match against Colby Covington.

The journey from the back streets of Miami to box-office superstar is as entertaining and colourful as Masvidal’s career himself. But nothing has ever been handed to Masvidal and he certainly has paid his dues to get to the top.

His parents were both immigrants, his mother arrived in the States from Peru and his father arriving from Cuba at the age of 14 after travelling 90 miles at sea on a makeshift raft made out of a tractor tyre.

The youngster moved around the 305 with his mother, but saw little of Masvidal Sr who was incarcerated for 18 years for a drug trafficking charge when his son was just four.

Despite being told his dad was in the army, Masvidal learned of his father’s whereabouts at 13 and began to visit him in prison regularly.

His childhood years were pleasant, albeit impoverished, with his hyperactive nature and desire to compete leading him to his first ever fight.

“I was about nine years old riding a bike with some friends when we got stopped by a group of guys who were three or four years older than us,” he recalled in 2020.

“One of the guys leans over, grabs my shirt, pulls out a knife and tells me to give him my bike. I was scared. He had a knife. But there was a fence between us so I pulled back, assessed the situation, then took off.

“Then, five or six months later, there’s this incident where my friend got slapped at school, and I asked who’s the guy that slapped you? He pointed to the kid and just by luck, I realised it was the same guy who pulled a knife on me.

“We started going at it by the side of the cafeteria. I knew how to throw punches by watching kung-fu movies, and I landed a flurry, plus a head butt which busted his nose.”

At 14, he was boxing after school and taking karate lessons to sate his hunger for violence. Although he began to wrestle for his high school team and earned a starting spot, his grades stopped him from competing.

Just four years later, he had his first ever professional mixed martial arts fight whilst still a teenager and scored a first round knockout.

A veteran of nearly 50 fights, the now 37-year-old has competed for Bellator, Strikeforce, Shark Fights and World Victory Road, but never managed to quite hit the heights in the UFC.

He was seen as something of a journeyman; a gate-keeper to the top echelons of the lightweight and then welterweight division. But a reality show saved his career.

Masvidal credits Dominican Republic game show, Exatlon Estados Unidos, for helping recharge his batteries.

“It was a restart button,” he told the UFC. “I got to know myself on a conscious level and a subconscious level.

“I got to be away from cell phones, from people, from music, from everything that we’re accustomed to.

“And in that time, I only heard one voice, which was mine. Maybe for some people that’s scary. I loved it. I was just getting to know myself, figuring out what really drives me, what I love about this sport so much, why I do this.”

And he was back with bang in 2019, spectacularly knocking out both Darren Till and Ben Askren, then cementing his status as one of the best fighters in the game with a beat down of Nate Diaz for the BMF title at Madison Square Garden in November. The iconic venue was also the setting for his defeat to Stephen Thompson at UFC 217 which prompted the exile.

“The Ben Askren fight, that was it,” commentator Joe Rogan said. “That was the cherry on top, and then of course the merking [sic] of Nate Diaz.

“He beat the f*** out of Nate Diaz. That was a crazy fight. He’s a monster. He’s hard for anybody to deal with.”

Masvidal himself continued: “That dude that fought that day; that guy is no longer with us. He’s resting in peace somewhere else.

“I buried that guy a long time ago. That other Gamebred doesn’t exist no more. It’s the resurrection of me.”

Conor McGregor once called a fight with himself ‘red panty night’ eluding to the millions of dollars you can expect earn against him, but a fight against ‘Gamebred’ is still yet to materialise.

Rumours suggested UFC president Dana White himself blocked the fight, with Masvidal suggesting ‘they don’t want a murder charge on me’ and that ‘the president said we can’t compete because I’m too much man’.

Instead, he has the chance to claim the UFC welterweight title in his 51st professional fight this weekend against an opponent he knows well. He and Covington were once inseparable, now they can’t stand the sight of each other.

Strap in and enjoy the hype train for as long as it lasts as characters like Masvidal do not come along very often.