Jorge Masvidal is known for being a calm and cool OG of the fight game but even he’s gone through nerves ahead of fight night.

Masvidal finds himself with newfound popularity. With knockout victories over Darren Till and Ben Askren, Masvidal’s stock soared. Of course, the five-second flying knee KO of Askren truly got the ball rolling. Masvidal went on to capture the one-time-only BMF championship by stopping Nate Diaz.

“Nervous” isn’t a word many would use to describe Masvidal, but even he admits he felt it going into one fight nearly 13 years ago. “Gamebred” shared why a 2007 bout with Yves Edwards had him anxious in a new video posted on his YouTube channel.


“There was one guy that I was rather nervous for. I wouldn’t say that I was like scared like I’m not gonna get in there with him, because I got in there in the ring and competed with him. But it was somebody that made me, at that point in my career I looked up to him too much and I didn’t know I’d be scrapping with this guy. And then before I knew it, me and him were scrapping. This is somebody that I grew up watching fight and he was close to my weight and I used to like how he’d throw down. He was one of the best lightweights that I’d seen at the moment and that was Yves Edwards.”

Masvidal said that once he was able to handle business against Edwards, it was full steam ahead.

“That battle going into that fight helped me for every other fight that’s happened because once I had that Yves Edwards fight I told myself since then I was like, ‘man if I could step in the cage with this dude and do my job, I don’t give a f*ck who comes next.’ Because it was the respect and admiration that I had for Yves at the time. He was killing the game for a while. I was still relatively new in the game and it was just a huge, huge fight for me. So that’d be one of the more nervous fights I’ve been in in my career.”

Masvidal scored a second-round head kick knockout win over Edwards in that bout. It was “Gamebred’s” 13th professional bout. Fast forward to 2020 and Masvidal’s next matchup will be the 49th fight of his pro MMA career. “Gamebred” is expected to challenge Kamaru Usman for the UFC welterweight title.