Leon Edwards laughs as he remembers how, seven years ago, he and a friend used to practise his interview technique at home in Birmingham. “I was terrible at interviews,” the UFC welterweight champion admits as his traumatic life, blighted by the murder of his father and his immersion in gangland strife as a teenager, had left him sounding broken and stilted.
“I was so nervous I’d be giving one-word answers,” Edwards says with an amused grimace as he gets ready to defend his title against Colby Covington in Las Vegas on Saturday night. “That’s all I could do then.”
He grins when I contrast those interview training sessions with his electrifying response after he shocked the mixed martial arts world by knocking out Kamaru Usman, the previously dominant fighter in the UFC, in Salt Lake City in August 2022. Usman had beaten Edwards when they first fought in 2015 and he was far ahead on points when they began the fifth and final round of their rematch. The Nigerian Nightmare looked set to extend his winning streak to 20 victories when Edwards snaked out a lethal left leg. His foot caught Usman flush on his temple, knocking out the champion in a stunning moment that changed Edwards’s life for ever.
In Salt Lake City, the deprivation and pain of his past tumbled out of Edwards in a raw stream of words. Rather than being media-coached into him, they came from real life as he hollered, “They all doubted me, said I couldn’t do it. Look at me now! Pound-for-pound. Headshot. Dead. That’s it. I’ve been down my whole life but look at me now. Champion of the world, look at me now. I was born in Jamaica with nothing. I lived in a wooden shed with a zinc roof. Look at me now!”
Edwards knows I follow boxing more than the UFC and so he smiles again when I say his speech reminds me, in a curious way, of Muhammad Ali screaming “I shook up the world!” after he shocked Sonny Liston in 1964. Ali was still called Cassius Clay then and he would shake up boxing and America with his outrageous bravado and political consciousness for decades. It is obviously trite to think of Ali when watching Edwards crying and yelling “Look at me now!” – but this is a story like no other in the UFC.
“‘I shook up the world’ are the perfect words to explain it because, at the time, Usman was the No 1 fighter,” Edwards says. “He’d never been taken down, hurt or defeated. He’d won the last 19 fights so he was this big monster that had beaten me before. No one, outside of my team, believed I had a chance. But I kept saying: ‘I truly believe I can beat him.’”
Yet he looked dejected after four rounds. “Yeah, 100%. The altitude in Utah got me,” Edwards admits. “I had a great first round and after that my body shut down. My coach Dave Lovell, who is also from Birmingham, said before the fifth: ‘What’s wrong with you? This is what you’ve been working for, for so long. Don’t let it slip through your fingers.’ He calmed my mind and in the last round I performed. It was a special night.”
Edwards defeated Usman on points in their rematch nine months ago and he is now on a 12-fight, eight-year unbeaten run. He is the only fighter to win a UFC title while based in Britain, but his powerful story has its roots in Kingston, Jamaica, and the bleakest corners of Birmingham. “I thought it was a normal childhood at the time,” Edwards says of life in Kingston, “but, looking back, I know it’s not. My house was a wooden shack, with a zinc roof and just one room. My mum, me and my brother would sleep in one bed. When my dad came home it was four in the bed. But I was still very happy because that’s how everyone lived in our neighbourhood and, actually, we were better off than most.
“My dad was a gang leader in my area and so I was one of the few kids who had a bicycle and a skateboard. If you consider the cards he was dealt, my dad did the best he could. I know he did wrong, getting involved in crime, and it led to his demise. But he had the smarts to immigrate to the UK and he soon brought his wife and kids to join him for a better life. He didn’t just leave us so he was a good man but, in bad circumstances, he made the wrong choices. But you got to remember that, in Jamaica, killing seemed normal. We were used to gunshots and death all around us.”
He pauses when I ask what happens to a child who grows up in such a brutalised environment. “I don’t know,” he says softly. “But at the time, my goal in life was to be like my dad – the biggest gangster. Now I look at my own son, who is 10, and I couldn’t imagine him living my life. But I have a normal mentality now. Back then you grew up with dying and I can see now how the mental health of the community was damaged.”
Edwards was only eight when the family moved to England and, as he says now, “I’d never seen so many white people in my life. I thought: ‘What the hell?’ We weren’t in the best area, Aston in Birmingham, but I still had my own bedroom. I couldn’t believe it. It was also way more safe than Jamaica where, when shootouts were happening, you got under the bed because the bullets went through the wood.’”
His accent was mocked mercilessly in Birmingham and Edwards began to clam up. “It was a lonely time. For most immigrants, everything is different about you.” That loneliness deepened when, aged 13, Edwards lost his father after he was murdered in a London nightclub. “We were still in Aston and my mum got the phone call and started crying. I was in the next room, so I heard her crying and thought: ‘It can’t be good news. Go to sleep.’ But she kept crying and then she walked into my room and came out with the bad news. I couldn’t believe it and then, yeah, I started crying too.”
Edwards looks up, his face etched with pain. “Losing your dad to murder makes it worse. My mum had to work even harder, to provide for me and my brother, so you start blaming everybody. Those were the darkest moments in my life.”
He soon fell into gang life. “When I came to Birmingham the two biggest gangs were the Burger Boys and the Johnson Crew. Aston is the Johnsons while the Burger Boys was Handsworth. There were postcode wars and, for me, it was the norm because I came from a similar thing in Jamaica.”
Edwards’s mother played a profound role in helping him find a new life. “I was getting into trouble,” he says, “and she created a path for me into mixed martial arts. We had moved to a new area, Erdington, and when a gym opened she said: ‘You should try this out.’ I know she was saying it to keep me away from the street and I said: ‘OK, I’ll give it a go.’ I wanted to make her a little proud.”
He is convinced that without the discipline of MMA he would now be either in jail or dead. “A hundred per cent. I feel I’d be involved in what most of my friends did – which was crime and drugs. Some of my friends have totally changed and, when I got into MMA, it helped them in a ricochet effect. They started coming to the gym, not to compete but to train and be part of the environment. Some have got their own businesses now, got married and are working nine to five. It’s good and I think I helped them.”
But some of Edwards’s oldest friends in Birmingham never escaped trouble and violence. “Only last year I lost one of my good friends, Reece, who was stabbed in the neck,” the 32-year-old says. “He was still involved in street stuff. He bled to death.”
Edwards is part of a youth mentoring project with the charity OnSide, helping kids in Birmingham escape gang life and knife crime. “Obviously you won’t be able to save the whole world, but martial arts changed my life and taught me so much,” he says. “I am trying to show them that they can change their lives too.”
He nods when asked if he shut down all the conflicted feelings surging through him as a survival technique. “That’s the perfect way to sum it up because you shut off a part of yourself to survive in that life and community. I believe it has scarred me but my past also humbles me. If I get down about little things now I remind myself that I was born in poverty. Now I’ve got money, a house with different bedrooms and a healthy son. I have everything that I prayed for when I was a kid.”
Edwards began fighting in MMA when he was around 16 and, after I point out that half his life has been spent in this world, he exclaims: “Shit! That’s a long time!” On Saturday he headlines a huge card in Las Vegas as his star continues to rise. “I hate losing and that motivates me in training camps.” Of Covington, one of the most infamous fighters in the UFC, he adds: “This is his third title shot and this will be the final one. He likes to talk a lot of trash and that was one of the main reasons why we want to fight Colby. He motivates me in camp and my confidence is sky-high. I just beat Usman twice, and he was supposed to be the guy, so I’m ready.”
After he beat Usman the first time, and unleashed his “Look at me now!” speech, Edwards’s mum was the first person he called in his locker room. “I phoned her straight away. She was crying, I was crying, and I was like: ‘Finally, we did it!’ She had watched it back home on television. She’s never actually been to a fight because she says she just can’t see me get hit. So at home the TV will be on and she’ll pop in, watch it, then back out. Someone will be telling her what’s going on and talking her through it.”
Edwards helped his mum finance her own Jamaican restaurant. “She always wanted to open a restaurant and I helped her do it,” he says at the end of a conversation where the free-flowing emotion would have shocked him and his friend during their early interview training. “So I got her a car and then we opened Sweet’s Kitchen and it’s going very well. She loves it and, when you think how much she helped me, that’s the best thing.”
Watch UFC welterweight champion Leon Edwards defend his belt against Colby Covington on 16 December live on TNT Sports Box Office
