“Having a team around me where it’s based on me, and they’re helping me out where they’re not worried about themselves because nobody has a fight right now, so they’re focused on being the perfect ‘Wonderboy,’” Muhammad said of his team at Valle Flow Striking, consisting of head coach Mike Valle, his long-time wrestling coach Louis Taylor, and training partners like Horacio Gutierrez and Ignacio Bahamondes. “I have the right team around me, and we’re very good at focusing on specific things that he does.
“For me to go from fighting one specialist where we had to train specifically for him, and now we have another specialist, a good understanding of our practices and knowing what we need to do.”
So too does everyone in Muhammad’s life, the MMA Twitter universe, and anyone else that watched Thompson’s fight with Burns in July.
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“It’s always funny when someone goes in there and beats him in a certain way,” began Muhammad, chuckling with every word. “So Gilbert Burns took him down, and everybody is like, ‘All you’ve got to do is take him down’ when there are a million guys before me that tried to take him down.
“Just because Gilbert Burns did it doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy.”
But Muhammad has never been one to seek out an easy path. Instead, he’s taken every fight that has been offered to him and raised his hand for more than a few challenging short-notice assignments too.
He’s occasionally stumbled, but each time he did, he’s dusted himself off and gotten right back to work, putting together the kind of resume that coaches and contemporaries respect.
