Athletes
The Full Story: Ramiz Brahimaj
UFC Welterweight Opens Up About Career-Threatening Injury, Dark Days Ahead Of First Appearance In More Than Two Years
“I haven’t talked to people about this.”
Ramiz Brahimaj sits in his car, parked in a low traffic area where he won’t be seen or heard, free to let his emotions flow.
“It sucks because we leave stuff dormant and we try to push it away, forget about it, but when we revisit it, all the feelings rush us, and it brings me back,” he adds, his deep Bronx twang giving an added heft to his words. “It’s been a crazy-*** ride. I can’t believe I’ve come back from that s***. It feels like bad dream.
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“It feels like a real bad dream, but I’m awake, I’m alive. Like the Morning Star, man, I’m alive and I’m here, ready to make the most out of every single moment.”
A DIFFERENT KIND OF PAIN
Brahimaj last stepped into the Octagon on February 26, 2022, securing a first-round rear-naked choke finish of Micheal Gillmore to bring his UFC record level at 2-2.
Another member of the Fortis MMA crew to work their way to the biggest stage in the sport through the LFA ranks, he’d alternated wins and losses to begin his UFC tenure and was eager to build off the dominant submission win. He quickly booked his next fight, signing on to face unbeaten rising star Michael Morales at UFC 277 in July at American Airlines Center in Dallas; his first pay-per-view assignment coming in his adopted hometown.
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A gnarly cut sustained in his final prep rounds with teammate Geoff Neal forced him out of the pairing, and ratcheted up his focus and intensity when he was finally healthy enough to line up his next fight and dive head-first into his next training camp.
He signed to fight Carlston Harris in mid-February of last year, and as he made his way through camp, everything was clicking.
“I had never felt that strong, physically, in my life, and that was the camp I was making leaps and bounds in,” he begins, looking out the window as he speaks, struggling to make eye contact through his phone. “I remember we got done wrestling and — man, this story kinda sucks to tell, just because it brings back some dark-*** memories, but it’s all good though; I gotta tell it.”
He looks into the camera, smiles, and exhales.
“That night, I went to bed, woke up the next morning, and I was like, ‘F***!’ I thought maybe it was a rhomboid issue or maybe I had rib that popped out, and I was like, ‘I’ll foam-roll this and I’ll get a massage later in the day.’ I started to go for a run, and not even a mile into the run, I was like, ‘I ain’t doing this.’ I know pain, but this was a really weird pain that I’ve never felt in my life. I kept feeling tingles in my fingers.
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“Tried to get a massage later that day, not even five minutes into the massage, I jumped. I was like, ‘I can’t do this; I’m out.’ Tried to get some training in for the next two days, and that is when it progressively got worse.
“I was trying to do rounds, and I will never forget: my shoulder cocked all the way up to my neck and it didn’t go down until a month-and-a-half later when I got trigger-point injections,” he says, pinning his right shoulder to his neck, demonstrating the agonizing position it was locked in.
His smile is gone, replaced by an anxious, unsettled look that only comes when someone is about to pull back that curtain on something they still haven’t really been able to fully process themselves.
Flashback: Ramiz Brahimaj Vows To Make It To The UFC
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Flashback: Ramiz Brahimaj Vows To Make It To The UFC
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“I got MRIs for three months, going from specialist to specialist,” continues Brahimaj, who returns to action this weekend in a matchup with Themba Gorimbo. “The first two guys were advocating for me to have immediate surgery so I can start alleviating the pain. They wanted to do a (spinal disc) fusion, and I was against it. I was like, ‘There is no way in f***! I’m barely 30 years old. I’m not doing this! There has got to be another way!’
“The doctors were telling me, ‘If you don’t get the surgery, you’re probably never gonna fight again. If you do get the surgery, you’re gonna have to re-learn how to do a lot of different things.’ I just kept telling them, ‘You guys don’t know what you’re talking about. You guys don’t know who you’re talking to. I’m gonna make you see. I’m gonna make this happen, and prove it to myself, first and foremost.’”
Brahimaj is a veteran of the United States Army.
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One of the mottos he lives by is “Charlie Mike,” a reference to the call letters C and M, which paired together stand for “Continue Mission.” He is not someone that is easily deterred, as those that watched his first UFC appearance will vividly remember.
Paired off with welterweight veteran Max Griffin, Brahimaj ate a right hand early in the third round that shook his equilibrium. Griffin chased him to the cage and landed a short elbow to the side of his head as they clinched along the fence.
When they broke into space, a crimson river streamed down the left side of Brahimaj’s head, his cauliflower ear dangling at an unnatural angle, looking unsettlingly close to having been severed entirely.
Guys like that don’t back down in the face of adversity.
They don’t shy away from months of agonizing physical therapy.
If anything, they steer into it, with their willingness to do so tethered to their identity as a person. Telling someone like that “this is your only option, and even then, there are no guarantees” is rarely received as honest medical advice, but instead taken as both a challenge and an affront.
Brahimaj said it himself — “You guys don’t know who you’re talking to.”
But the thing with having so much of your being tied to that kind of toughness, the belief that you’re the most tenacious bastard in the room and no one knows what you’re capable of doing is that when something comes along that actually forces you to stop and confront those ideas, what you discover can shake you to your core.
A DIFFERENT KIND OF FIGHT
Highlight: Ramiz Brahimaj Chokes Out Palatnikov | UFC Fight Night: Cannonier vs Gastelum
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Highlight: Ramiz Brahimaj Chokes Out Palatnikov | UFC Fight Night: Cannonier vs Gastelum
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Brahimaj avoided surgery.
Despite being told it was his best option, he stuck to his guns, eventually finding a specialist from his gym that promised to help him slowly, methodically work his way back from the impingement in his shoulder that required multiple spinal injections and caused his right arm to atrophy.
With his shoulder initially stuck to his neck, the pain and lack of consistent, restful sleep started to get on top of him. Unable to work out in the manner he was accustomed to was difficult, and the impact it had on his physical appearance chipped away at his self-esteem.
“I was in the worst pain of my entire life,” he says, back to struggling to look in the camera, as if avoiding eye contact will somehow make the grim realities he’s about to share to someone other than those closest to him easier to admit and accept.
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“I was eating painkillers like candy. I blimped up to 225 pounds,” he continues, tears beginning to roll down his cheeks. “I remember when I started doing physical therapy, I could not pull down a five-pound band, and bear in mind, the week before this, I was setting PRs and physically the strongest I had ever been.
“The kind of mental mind-f*** that I was going through was…”
He stops himself, wiping his cheeks, searching for the words.
“I don’t claim that I’m the strongest human in the world, but I am aware that I have to be a rock, a boulder for everybody around me, for my family, and it felt like all of my powers had gotten taken away from me, and that’s what really contributed to me hitting that low point.
“I never felt as humiliated in my life as I did doing that PT…”
He trails off again, looking around the interior of his car for exits, a way to avoid sharing the painful memories flooding his mind. He steels himself, but before he resumes, I interrupt him.
Brahimaj and I have spoken multiple times in the past — we did an interview ahead of his UFC debut against Griffin and again prior to his sophomore outing against Sasha Palatnikov.
We’ve stayed in touch, dropping into one another’s DMs on occasion to offer birthday wishes and kind words to one another. When he turns up in the corner of one of his teammates, I tag him on Twitter, knowing he’ll see it and smile, dubbing him “The Lieutenant,” given that Fortis MMA head coach Sayif Saud has become known as “The General.”
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When I reached out to organize this particular call, he responded almost immediately with enthusiasm; a time coordinated in one back-and-forth, signed off with a fist bump emoji and anticipation.
As he sits in his car, afraid to discuss a period that he’s still struggling to deal with more than a year later, I interrupt him to say, “Thank you.”
We talk about strength all the time in this sport, but rarely as a core piece of someone’s character and even less often when it comes to the strength it takes to be open and vulnerable; to allow someone else to see you at your most raw and human.
As I tell him what it means to me for him to sit in his car and share this story with me — for him to want to share this with me and trust me to handle it with the care and detail it deserves — he breaks down, the tears that had been escaping in single lines now coming in waves.
After a couple beats, he thanks me for what I’ve said, and as we wipe tears from our faces, he continues.
“I think it happened in the first month, month-and-a-half,” he says. “I was eating the painkillers like candy — the gabapentin, the nerve-blockers — because I was in excruciating pain. I was masking it to the best of my abilities, but that was some of the worst pain I’ve ever felt in my life. I was barely sleeping.
“I couldn’t pick up my nephew,” Brahimaj adds, barely able to get the words out. “I felt emasculated and humiliated because I couldn’t even pull down a five-pound band.”
It’s some Marcellus Wallace and Butch s*** — pride f****** with him — except it’s also making him question himself as a person, as a man, as the person he’s always held himself out to be.
The strong one. The rock. The soldier, literally and figuratively.
“If I’m not those things, then who am I? What kind of man am I that I can’t even pull down a five-pound band? No man; that’s the answer.”
He doesn’t say any of things, but it’s unmistakably where his mind went in the moment, and those wounds are far from healed.
“When I say this injury humbled me to the point that it taught me a lesson about substance abuse — something that I was never familiar with — I saw how people could fall down the cracks and lose themselves entirely, just off taking that gabapentin,” he says, voice getting a little quieter. “I didn’t want to live any more.
Ramiz Brahimaj Submits Gilmore In Round 1 | UFC Fight Night: Makhachev vs Green
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Ramiz Brahimaj Submits Gilmore In Round 1 | UFC Fight Night: Makhachev vs Green
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“When I was taking that gabapentin, I had to stop. It was a week of me taking it, but it f***** me up to the point where I didn’t even want to live anymore. I mean that. I would take it and think, ‘It’s all right. Go to sleep and maybe we don’t wake up in the morning. It’s okay. The pain goes away.’”
We sit in silence for a moment — Brahimaj processing both a painful memory that is difficult to re-live and the fact that he’s said it out loud to someone that isn’t a member of his immediate or fighting family, while I just want to give him every inch of space and grace an admission of that magnitude deserves.
If he had said, “I can’t talk about this anymore; ask me about Themba Gorimbo” right then and there, we would have pivoted to his upcoming fight on the spot and not returned to that thread until he reached out to me in the future, ready to share the rest of the story.
But he doesn’t.
Instead, Brahimaj lets out a deep exhale and continues.
“My mom, she was way stronger than me,” he says, wiping tears off his cheek, smiling as he speaks about his mother. “She just kept re-affirming and re-assuring, ‘Son, you’re gonna get past this. I promise you, son.’
“One day, I was so out from the meds I was taking, she came in my room and she had a talk with me. She said, ‘I don’t want you to take this stuff no more. I need you to be strong for your Mom.’ She saw how much it was f****** me up. She sat there and said, ‘If you don’t do this for anybody else, do it for me and do it for yourself. Don’t take these pills anymore, because they’re destroying you.’
“I haven’t touched those pills since then, and I never will again in my life.”
A DIFFERENT KIND OF OPPORTUNITY
Everyone deals with this kind of stuff differently, but there was only ever one way Brahimaj was going to face everything this situation brought to his doorstep: head-on.
Charlie Mike.
Continue Mission.
“When it happened, I had never been that close to retiring in my life, and I think that is why it gave me a new life, breathed fresh air into my lungs,” he says. “I thought everything was done, brother — my whole grappling career, my fighting career; everything was done.
“I told myself, ‘This isn’t it. You’re gonna overcome this, and when you do, it’s gonna be something great; I promise you.’ I made a promise to myself. I didn’t know how I was gonna do it — I had no idea — but I knew I was gonna go step-by-step, day-by-day, breath-by-breath, and it would come to me.”
Part of what helped him was staying connected to his team.
Throughout his ordeal, Brahimaj continued to turn up to the gym and be a leader in the room. He cornered fighters just like always, making the walk at multiple UFC events while his career was on pause, unsure if it would ever start again.
I ask how difficult it was to do so, if there was ever a point where he thought about taking a time out and stepping back to understandably focus on himself.
“This is where it goes to Coach Sayif now,” he says, adjusting himself in his seat, smiling back at me on his phone. “That man is the older brother I never had. He’s a real mentor to me. If my father is to pass away, that man is a father to me.
“That guy has overcome a lot of stuff in life — and I might not tell him this — but there is a lot of motivation I gather from that guy, because I see how his career was cut short, and what he wanted to do. He was never selfish. He was always self-less, and, no matter what, that guy — he’s away from his family, he’s away from everything, so I knew I had invested all of this time into my team, and even if I was gonna be an amputee, paralyzed or crippled, I swore to myself that I was gonna be there for every one of my teammates, the same way they were always there for me.
“I knew it was bigger than me, greater than me — it’s always been that way — and I always knew that in order for me to be a really strong link and not corrode, not rust out, I had to be there, and it was amazing to feel it.
“Just to be there to watch my team succeed — to make the walk, to watch them finish a training camp, navigate through these rough terrains — it meant the world to be to be a part of their dreams, and I knew that it was required of me, and I couldn’t be away for too long.”
He keeps going; “The Lieutenant” in a rhythm, speaking with pride, back showing his incredible strength of character.
“I know that after fighting, I have a commitment to all of these up-and-comers, because I still think about that Ramiz Brahimaj back in 2013 in Louisiana, at the Alexandria, that had no idea what he was doing in life — 19, 20 years old, fighting in a ballroom inside the hotel, warming up in the kitchen next to a freezer, chefs walking past telling me ‘Good luck out there’ — and I can’t let that guy down.
“I know there are a bunch of up-and-comers that have inspiring stories — for sure greater than mine — that have overcome a lot more than I can, so if I can help them and guide them towards their dreams the same way that I was guided towards my dreams, that means the absolute world to me.”
His eyes bright, his face glowing, Brahimaj chuckles.
“So to answer your question, it definitely meant everything to me when I walked out with my team and I was helping them during these troubling times.”
Back in October, Brahimaj returned to live action, competing in a grappling match. When he submitted his opponent, he bounced to his feet and shot finger guns at his people on the other side of the cage; the exuberance from being back in his element unmistakable in the smile on his face.
In March, he got the call to face Gorimbo in his return to the Octagon.
“It was the biggest reality check for me, and it made me love fighting and miss fighting so much,” he says, reflecting on the entire ordeal just a couple weeks out from his first UFC appearance in more than two years. “It made me hate myself for all the times I ever took my health for granted, my career for granted, if I was ever a s***-head, and it brought a different mindset to me because I thought it was the end; I really did.
“I thought that was it. I thought I was gonna have to write something that I did not wanna write.
“I’ve probably been a thorn in the side of Sean Shelby, too, pulling out of my last two fights, and now I just wanna apologize to him,” he adds. “It was one of the lowest points of my life and I can’t wait to come back and do so much more for him and the company. I’m ever grateful to everybody that has been involved, everybody that has been around me.
“I can’t sing their praises enough.”
Gorimbo is a game opponent and a good man, entering on a two-fight winning streak and carrying solid momentum as a result of his own story of struggle, perseverance, and giving back has gone viral with a little help from his new friend, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson.
But Saturday night isn’t about the person standing opposite him in the Octagon; it’s about continuing this latest mission, taking the final steps on the long, difficult road back, and the next steps in a journey of appreciation.
“The one thing I’ve been trying to do is be in the moment as much as possible, and I have every intention, with God as my witness, to be in the moment May 18 and handle business; live and breathe every second in that Octagon,” offers Brahimaj, finally able to look forward again.
“Whether I get this guy out in the first round, second round, third round or beat him by decision, I will enjoy every single second, every single breath, every motion, movement — from the warmup to the walk to the Octagon, to walking up those steps, to seeing my opponent, seeing the referee, to the first exchange to the last exchange.
"I have every intention, God-willing, of being ever-present in that moment and making the most of it, because it feels like everything was stripped away,” he adds. “It feels like what happened was almost an out of body experience where I was stripped away from Ramiz Brahimaj, and the angels were telling me, ‘Look at what you had! Look what you could do! It’s about to be away from you, so if we give you another chance, what are you gonna do with it?’”
The answer is simple: Brahimaj hopes to help people by continuing to share his story, understanding that having the strength to be vulnerable and let people in to one of the most difficult moments of his life is a powerful tool that can help someone else.
“I’m not claiming to be the strongest human in the world, but I just hope that somebody can read this and see that even through my pain, this testimony here — you’ve just gotta will it, you’ve just gotta keep going because there are people that need you,” he says. “Even if you think they don’t, they need you.”
As for this weekend, in some ways, the outcome doesn’t really matter, because he’s already won.
"Getting here, being able to talk to you right now is the biggest win,” he says when I ask him again about his fight with Gorimbo. "Making it through this camp is the biggest win. When I step into that Octagon on May 18, that’s another win. When I win May 18, that’s the cherry on top.”
“Yeah, but how good is it going to feel, getting that big bear hug from Coach Sayif, standing in the center of the cage, and hearing, ‘Your winner — let’s just say by submission — Ramiz Brahimaj?’” I ask.
Thirty silent seconds pass before Brahimaj drops his head and quietly tells himself, “Wow; it is gonna happen.
“I’m back, brother,” he says. “I’m back, and there’s a lot more left; I feel it.”
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