It will be a bittersweet moment for Kamaru Usman on Saturday night when he lines up for UFC 251 in an empty arena without his father cage side.
The UFC welterweight champion’s father, Muhammed, was released from prison in Texas in February after serving a 180-month sentence for health care fraud, according to ESPN.
He had been watching his son – ‘The Nigerian Nightmare’ – in the Octagon on basic cable in jail.
Usman was hoping that this summer he would be there in person, admitting: ‘Pre-Covid-19 pandemic, this was the culmination of everything I’ve done.
‘This was the moment my father was able to be cageside to watch his son who had worked to be on the centre stage of the world.
‘It’s good that he’s able to watch it at home live on pay-per-view, but it would have meant a lot if he was there with me,’ he said at the UFC virtual media day on Thursday.
Usman is defending his title against late-replacement Jorge Masvidal, and he insists he wants to ‘hear each shot land’ in the absence of getting overhyped by the corwd.
He continued: ‘There’s a different fight that you fight with yourself that … sometimes can get lost in a stadium of 20,000 people. It can uplift you or be a detriment.
‘But now you’ve got a guy beating your ass and talking to you, letting him know his dominance over you. It’s another level of breaking someone mentally.
‘When you beat their ass from start to finish, it breaks them internally and takes something away that they can never get back,’ said Usman, whose original opponent Gilbert Burns withdrew last week after testing positive for coronavirus.
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