Mixed Martial Arts Career
Vera's first professional mixed martial arts bout was on July 6, 2002, while training under Floyd Mayweather. He won the fight against Adam Rivera via TKO in the first round. He fought and won another bout in 2004 before entering a World Extreme Cagefighting heavyweight tournament in 2005, where he won two bouts in one night, including a bout against The Ultimate Fighter 2's Mike Whitehead in the finals.
Vera moved to San Diego, California, on December 31, 2003, to accept a training position with City Boxing in San Diego. At City Boxing, Vera excelled as a trainer and was taken under the wing of City Boxing owner Mark Dion, who became his manager and introduced him to kickboxing great Rob Kaman. With Vera's success as a trainer and a mixed martial arts fighter, Dion gave Vera partial ownership of City Boxing.
Read more about this topic: Brandon Vera
Famous quotes containing the words mixed, martial, arts and/or career:
“I’ll wager that it was impossible after we got mixed together to tell an anti from a suffragist by her clothes. There might have been a difference, though, in the expression of the faces and the shape of the heads.”
—Susan B. Anthony (1820–1906)
“Strike the concertina’s melancholy string!
Blow the spirit-stirring harp like any thing!
Let the piano’s martial blast
Rouse the Echoes of the Past,”
—Sir William Schwenck Gilbert (1836–1911)
“Hardly any human being is capable of pursuing two professions or two arts rightly.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)
“Whether lawyer, politician or executive, the American who knows what’s good for his career seeks an institutional rather than an individual identity. He becomes the man from NBC or IBM. The institutional imprint furnishes him with pension, meaning, proofs of existence. A man without a company name is a man without a country.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)