At that moment I thought, What do I do now? Where I would have called home, now I instantly had to make decisions on my own. “I was actually at the airport about to board a flight back home to Texas when I got the call on the phone that my father was sentenced. Kamaru pegs this as the moment his childhood officially ended. In May 2010, Muhammed was convicted on 14 charges, sentenced to 15 years in federal prison and ordered to pay restitution and fines of more than $1.3 million. Prosecutors alleged that an ambulance company licensed to Muhammed had been submitting false invoices and false claims, most regarding transportation to fraudulent dialysis treatments.

In 2009, Muhammed was arrested at the family residence and charged with various counts of health care fraud. It also provided a welcome distraction from what was happening at home. Usman staved off homesickness by focusing on his wrestling. Both campuses were impossibly far removed from the Dallas suburbs, to say nothing of Nigeria. He headed off to wrestle in college, first to William Penn in Iowa-where, at a party, he once bumped into another Iowa wrestler, Jon Jones-and then to Nebraska at Kearney.

With little interest-much less prodding-from his parents, Usman developed into one of the best wrestlers in the state, going 53–3 as a senior at Bowie High School in Arlington. Keep running laps, and your stamina improves. Practice and repractice moves, and they become ingrained as muscle memory. Keep lifting weights, and your body takes on different dimensions. He liked the autonomy of it and the incremental improvement. But he developed a special fondness for wrestling. Kamaru went to school, quickly picked up English and, as an athletic kid, played most sports. When Kamaru was 8, the family reunited in Texas, where Muhammed was working in the medical health profession. There was a blackout in the village at the time, and it took a few weeks before the Usman boys finally realized the function of the plastic contraption. He once shipped a Nintendo console as a Christmas gift. He couldn’t afford to return home, but sent money back to Nigeria when he could. Muhammed Usman began working in pharmaceutical sales. When he was 2, his father left for the United States, settling outside Dallas, to try to construct a better life for the family. He was born in Nigeria, the oldest of three brothers. For all the accidental fighters, for all the UFC stars who stumbled upon the sport, Usman has a particularly unlikely origin story.

Cliff keen dream team classic