GARDEN CITY, N.Y. – When Nazim Sadykhov was 6, he moved from Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, to Brooklyn, N.Y., with his family and by that point, he’d already been training karate for almost three years. That’s why Sadykhov, now 28, describes himself as a “life-long mixed martial artist.”
But even for him, trying to convince his friends and family that he wanted to make a career out of MMA, that was hard to do.
“I think that every fighter, at one point or another, has to go through something like that, has to explain that this is really what I want to do (and that) it’s not just something that you do on the weekend, and it’s cool,” Azerbaijan, started taking MMA seriously at 20, recently told MMA Junkie. “To force people to believe that you’re going to make a career out of this is very difficult.”
