Former football hooligan Djorden Santos discusses insane journey ahead of UFC 313 debut
Djorden Santos reached the pinnacle of the sport of mixed martial arts by joining the UFC in 2024, and making his debut on a pay-per-view card in Las Vegas sounds unthinkable when you look back at his life ahead of Saturday’s middleweight clash with Ozzy Diaz.
Born in Belo Horizonte, Santos was only 4 when his parents decided to move back to their hometown of Trindade, located just 16 miles away from state capital Goiania. He had a pretty normal childhood for a kid without any luxuries, and he followed the wrong path early in his teenage years. A supporter of local football clube Goias Esporte Clube, Santos quickly realized it was more to that than just watching games.
“When I had my first contact with stadiums and soccer firms, I kind of fell in love with it,” Santos told MMA Fighting. “It wasn’t the aggressiveness per se, but going there and cheering and jumping and celebrating and winning. That motivated me more and more. And we had wars between local firms and rivalries going on, and I enjoyed that even more.”
At 13 years of age, Santos became known among fellow hooligans as one who would never run away from a fist fight.
“My mom never liked it, and she suffered a lot at the time,” Santos said. “It was difficult for her because I started smoking and drinking. I starting doing bad stuff like hoping on buses without paying, other things that put your life at risk. Soccer firms are more aggressive in Goias than in other places of Brazil. People take it very seriously. And when I saw people losing their lives, and others suffering serious consequences, I backed away from this dangerous path that made my mom sad.”
Santos joined a martial arts gym, and it changed his life. He was no longer “a fat kid,” and started using his aggressiveness and notorious fighting skills in a good way. Then known as “Maguila”, a tribute to popular Brazilian heavyweight boxer Adilson Rodrigues, Santos immediately fell in love with the new sport.
“Martial arts was like a gift from God,” Santos said. “Who knows what would have happened if I had stayed there. I saw bad things happen to my friends, and walked away from the firms and the streets, and shifted my aggressiveness towards martial arts from that moment on.”
Living in a small town like Trindade, the teenager went online to see where would be a good place to train martial arts, and have a career in the sport, and that’s when he saw Belo Horizonte’s Full House gym.
“I was still in high school and told my mom I wanted to move to Belo Horizonte to fight. She just laughed,” Santos recalls. “I insisted, and she said I could go if I got good grades at school.”
Santos did his part, and his mother paid for his bus ticket to go to Belo Horizonte. His older brother tagged along to make sure Full House was legit and gave his blessing.
Life wasn’t easy for a 14-year-old living hundreds of miles away from his parents to hopefully start a career in combat sports, though.
“I lived in a pitbull kennel that belonged to a friend of mine,” Santos said. “It was a little house for a caretaker, but it was far, far away from the gym. It smelled so bad, and it was inside a favela, so I was always going back and forth and seeing people get killed. It was a very difficult time because I was very young.
“And it wasn’t any easier at the gym either. I was young, and there were people there about to go to the UFC, so I was getting beat up every single day. Sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the night having nightmares, having hallucinations, thinking that I had ride a bicycle for 10, 15 miles a day to get to the gym and back home.”
A friend felt bad for Santos and offered him a bed at home that was closer to the gym. Santos could now focus more on evolving as a fighter, and won three amateur fights in 2014. He turned pro and scored a victory in Belo Horizonte, before decided to move back to Trindade.
“My mom sent me $10 to survive the week, and I was living on someone else’s house as a favor,” Santos said. “I was becoming a man now, and it was hard to see myself in that situation. I left to Trindade to stay closer to my mom and decided to quit fighting, but I loved it too much to simply give up.”
Santos looked for a gym in the area that was good enough to resume his career, but also close enough to visit his mother more frequently. A Google search showed Constrictor Team, where the likes of Paulo Thiago, Renato Moicano, Rani Yahya, Francisco Trinaldo and Adriano Moraes started their careers. Santos took a bus, and only had money to rent a bedroom for two weeks, so his plan was to sign up for the team and get a job.
Moicano, a member of Constrictor Team who had just opened his own gym in Brasilia, offered his new teammate a job as a cleaner to help him earn extra money. Santos, now 5-0 as a professional, moved full-time to Moicano’s team.
The call to make his international debut came in 2019, with Santos taking on 22-fight veteran Christian Torres six weeks later at Titan FC 52, but the trip to Fort Lauderdale almost ruined his career. Training wasn’t ideal, and he had to cut almost 38 pounds in 40 days — all that while still balancing his career with a side job. On top of that, Santos had to borrow money to pay for the flight to Florida.
He lost a decision, and said he’s learned a lot about himself that night. Seeing the glass half full wouldn’t make the debt go away, and he found himself homeless and broke.
“I was going back to my mom’s house again, I was going to quit for a second time, but a friend of mine said no,” Santos said. “He offered me a bed and said I could stay for a couple of months while I got back to my feet. I started delivering food, riding a motorcycle all day and training at night, all to have something to eat and pay for that flight. It was very frustrating to see I had lost everything: fight, money, investment, team, house. I was like, this isn’t for me. I don’t want to fight anymore.”
Santos quit fighting. Again. He kept training sporadically, sure, but had given up on making it a career.
That all changed when UFC returned to Brasilia for a Fight Night. Charles Oliveira was headlining the show against Kevin Lee, and his longtime friend Moicano was on the card. Santos stopped by the UFC host hotel to check on Moicano and the UFC circus, and decided to give it another try. Moicano gave him a ticket to watch the event that week, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced the country to shut down, and the UFC would go on without fans for the first time in its history.
“I can’t believe it, man,” Santos reacted at the time. “When something good is finally about to happen, something bad happens. Things just won’t work. I can’t even go to the UFC as a spectator, man.”
This time, instead of giving up, he used heartbreak as motivation. He was “very fat,” walking around at 265 pounds, but trusted his manager with a path back to the good old times. Santos won two fights at heavyweight in 2021 before going back to middleweight in 2022, claiming the Thunder Fight belt that would be his ticket to Dana White’s Contender Series.
“We bear those fruits today,” said Santos, who had to cut 77 pounds ahead of his DWCS win over Will Currie. “And now I’m making my UFC debut almost exactly 10 years after my MMA debut. I look back and feel proud of the journey I had to go through. It was very hard, very unlikely, but in my head I always felt it was possible. I beat the odds before, and I’ll beat them again. I have a work to do, and a mountain to climb, and I’m just getting started.”