The increasingly promising early career of Strabane's James Gallagher took another jolt upwards on Saturday night as he made the pressure of a Madison Square Garden crowd look like a non-factor in his first-round win over Chinzo Machida at Bellator NYC.
Gallagher showed that his grappling was on another level to that of Machida, brother of Lyoto and someone who was supposed to be too experienced for the Irishman according to his doubters, as he effortlessly worked a rear naked choke to get the finish and turned a number of heads while doing so.
One man who was not surprised was John Kavanagh, who has been there from the very beginning, and after extending his record as an MMA coach to 2-0 at MSG, he joined Ariel Helwani on The MMA Hour for a chat.
Helwani asked Kavanagh where it all began, which prompted the SBG head coach to tell the story about how he discovered Gallagher as a 13-year-old fighting against a 22-year-old grown man near Strabane, something he initially wanted absolutely no part of.
So I was judging a fight show in a small part of Ireland where he's from and a 13-year-old walked out, and he was fighting a 22-year-old.
I told the promoter I'm not going to be involved with this, a child should not be fighting an adult, so I left the show. But, I kind of popped my head in and watched out of morbid curiosity, and this 13-year-old took a few hard shots, took a guy down, took his back, and choked him. A 22-year-old man.
There's a big difference between a 13-year-old and a 22-year-old, so there was serious potential there. I had a chat with his parents and him, and I said look, I'll train him, but he's not allowed to fight MMA again until I say.
I didn't like the idea of him being hit in the head at that young age. Then he moved in with me, he was doing an eight-hour round-trip to do a one-hour class, his father would drive him four hours down, he'd train for one hour, and then four hours back, we kept that up for two years and then at 15 he dropped out of school and moved down to Dublin.
He moved in with me, and then we became.. I like to think older brother, but sometimes I get confused for his father.
That is absolutely insane.
Think about it for a second, there are 13-year-olds waiting to start first year of secondary school late this summer, and here is James Gallagher not only fighting adults, but beating them at that age.
Gallagher's unrelenting self-confidence is always going to upset a few people who perceive it as arrogance, but he was all class both before and indeed after defeating Chinzo Machida and has a genuinely exciting future ahead of him.
Of course, Ariel Helwani couldn't have Kavanagh on without asking about the upcoming Conor McGregor vs Floyd Mayweather fight, and the biggest takeaway from that chat was the fact that Conor has told his coach to be ready to return to the octagon in December, which suggests reports that he would never return to the UFC were wide of the mark.
You can watch the latest episode of The MMA Hour in full below:
