Trai Santos on early nerves, his grandma and climbing the Wichita cards
Wichita's Trai Santos of NextGen Fight Team talks about the gym visit that scared him off and the person he calls his favorite on the planet.
The first walk into a gym
Trai Santos is from Wichita, Kansas, and trains with NextGen Fight Team. He competes as a professional and is listed at 2-2 in professional MMA. In an interview with MMA Futures in August, he talked about where it started, who keeps him grounded and how far he has come on the local scene. You can find his roster page here.
His story does not begin with a kid who charged through the door and never looked back. It begins with a teenager who turned around.
Santos told MMA Futures that he first went into a gym while he was still in high school, when he was probably around 17. He did not stay long that first time.
"I looked at it, got scared, and went back home."
It is an honest thing for a fighter to say out loud. Plenty of people who now make the walk to a cage had a moment like that, standing in a doorway and deciding it was not their day. Santos does not dress it up. He simply owns that the first look was enough to send him home, and that he came back to it later.
From the opening bout to the top of the bill
The part of his story Santos clearly enjoys telling is how his place on the card has changed. He told MMA Futures that he started out at EFC in Wichita, in the first fight of the night, the slot that goes on while people are still finding their seats.
"I started first fight of the night. Now I'm headlining the cards."
For a fighter who once looked at a gym and went back home, that line carries some weight. The opening spot and the main event are the two ends of a local card, and Santos has now seen both of them from the inside. He is a Wichita fighter who has done that climb in Wichita, in front of the same community that watched him start.
He also talked about what he has picked up along the way, including a lesson about calf kicks from a past outing. He described them as something he now takes very seriously, the kind of detail fighters only learn by feeling it.
His favorite person
Asked who matters most to him, Santos did not hesitate for long. He told MMA Futures it is probably his grandma.
"She's just my favorite person on the planet."
It is a short answer, and it does not need to be any longer. Fighters spend a lot of time talking about training camps and game plans, but the people who show up for them outside the gym tend to say more about who they are. For Santos, that person is his grandmother.
Put the pieces together and you get a clear picture: a Wichita kid who got nervous the first time he saw the inside of a gym, came back anyway, worked his way from the first bout of the evening to the top of local cards with NextGen Fight Team, and still names his grandma as the person he loves most. That is Trai Santos, in his own words.