Fighting saved Costa, but with the exception of his brother, his family wasn’t convinced this was a good thing, especially when he expressed the desire to make a living out of it one day, a prospect that didn’t seem too promising when trips to the gym usually saw Costa as the nail and not the hammer.
“I would get beat up a lot because I was training with pro MMA fighters,” he said. “My family didn’t want me to keep fighting; nobody liked it. My brother was the only one to support me and said he would help me, but I didn’t even know if that’s what I really wanted to do. I kept training, but my brother had an accident and passed away in 2013. That really affected me, but it also gave me a lot of strength to keep going.”
The pattern became clear from there – school, work, then training. Costa was relentless.
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“I was always very focused on studying,” he said. “In high school, I was told that needed to choose between studying or fighting. I would go to school in the morning, and when school was over, I would grab my cart to sell popsicles on the streets. In the afternoons, I would go train at the gym and I kept that routine for two years. After finishing high school, I decided to focus on just one thing, so I focused on MMA.”
In 2014, the 17-year-old Costa made his pro debut with a three-round split decision win over Benjamin Junior Coelho Pantoja and raced out to an 8-0 record. A 4-4 stretch followed, but a run in which he won seven of his next eight was the one that earned him the short-notice call to the UFC. Included was a 2020 win over Anderson Ferreira that he won’t forget anytime soon.
