Background
Born into a poor family, dos Santos was raised by a single mother. In order to help his family, he started to work at the age of 10. Dos Santos was 19 years old when he first met his future wife, Vilsana Picolli, in a restaurant where he worked as a waiter. His first serious contact with martial arts only happened when he was 21 years old, when Cigano started to train Brazilian Jiu Jitsu under Yuri Carlton. After only six months of training, he won a few Jiu Jitsu tournaments in Salvador. Dos Santos was soon invited to join an MMA practice, where he met his boxing coach Luiz Carlos Dórea, and roughly a year after he started training jiu jitsu, he made his debut professional fight.
Read more about this topic: Junior Dos Santos
Famous quotes containing the word background:
“They were more than hostile. In the first place, I was a south Georgian and I was looked upon as a fiscal conservative, and the Atlanta newspapers quite erroneously, because they didn’t know anything about me or my background here in Plains, decided that I was also a racial conservative.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“In the true sense one’s native land, with its background of tradition, early impressions, reminiscences and other things dear to one, is not enough to make sensitive human beings feel at home.”
—Emma Goldman (1869–1940)
“Silence is the universal refuge, the sequel to all dull discourses and all foolish acts, a balm to our every chagrin, as welcome after satiety as after disappointment; that background which the painter may not daub, be he master or bungler, and which, however awkward a figure we may have made in the foreground, remains ever our inviolable asylum, where no indignity can assail, no personality can disturb us.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)