'My Hard Work Paid Off': Jamahal Hill Reflects on Long Journey to UFC Title

Jamahal Hill did the predictable afterglow things.

He celebrated with his team. He beat his chest. He strutted defiantly around the Octagon to the deep dismay of a Rio de Janeiro crowd that had passionately backed his Brazilian-born foe.

Then it happened.

Upon having the UFC's light heavyweight title belt strapped around his waist after what's accurately labeled a legal assault on Glover Teixeira, the enormity of Hill's feat—and the reality of a dream he'd been toting since high school coming true—breached a menacing exterior and revealed raw emotion.

He dropped to his knees. He cradled his head in his hands.

And as a rapt combat sports world watched, he sobbed with unapologetic heaves.

It was a championship-level therapeutic release, he told Bleacher Report.

"All the hours in the gym paying, questioning, 'Do I really want to do this?'" Hill said.

"Doubters, haters. Just everything. Just the whole journey. The dreams that I had. The things that I envisioned. It was just all real. It just all happened."

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For a kid born in Chicago, raised in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and without so much as a sliver of mixed martial experience until his late teens—he took up the sport after watching Anderson Silva beat Forrest Griffin at UFC 101 and deciding, "Oh, s--t, this is dope"—it seemed a particularly impractical dream.

But what he lacked in combat experience he made up for in athletic acumen.

And confidence. Or if you prefer, full-on schoolboy brashness.

"I played other sports. And I always knew, even as a kid, I'd be a world champion," he said.

"That was whatever sport I decided I was going to play. Regardless of what I did, I knew I was going to be one of the best. I knew I was going to be a champion in it."

A would-be college basketball career was aborted once the MMA bug bit and the rangy Hill, whose 6'4" frame still looks thin at 205 pounds, was soon all-in studying Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

He began fighting as an amateur and made steady progress but admitted after a few years—specifically in 2013 and into 2014—that doubts began to creep in about the practicality of a combat lifestyle.

In other words, about whether it'd ever pay the bills on a consistent basis.

"It was 'Am I doing the right thing?'" said Hill, who became a father in high school and now has six children. "Not 'Can I?' I was still an amateur at the time. I took time off.

"I didn't see the money in it."

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Right about then, though, a "Notorious" example emerged.

"That's when Conor McGregor happened," he said, recalling the Irishman's pay-per-view debut at UFC 178. "I just started to see, like, 'All right, I'll make money in this.'

"That and the emergence of Jon Jones gave me somebody who I felt like could, one day, give me the type of fight that I wanted."

He cashed his first combat paycheck exactly three years and three days later, earned a UFC deal in 2019 after a win on Dana White's Contender Series in his sixth pro appearance, and reached No. 7 in the light heavyweight rankings on the strength of six wins (one was changed to a no-contest) in seven fights through the end of 2022.

An incremental climb toward high-profile opportunity seemed likely in the new year.

But the combination of champion Jiří Procházka's hiatus and a draw in a hastily arranged bout for his suddenly vacant title prompted White and Co. to instantly elevate ex-champ Teixeira to main event status for the upcoming UFC 283 show in Brazil.

And when the "Who Should Glover Fight?" music stopped, Hill leapt at the final chair.

"I got the call quickly, and we really didn't have time to think about it," he said.

"They obviously wanted me to go soon, right away. They'd made up their mind."

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But the knee-jerk stand-in was no patsy for the hometown hero.

In fact, in spite of lopsided picks against him on the B/R site—alongside CBSSports.com, MMAFighting.com and others—he did a definitively violent number on his black-belted foe, opening sickening gashes on Teixeira's right eyebrow and left eye that poured blood across the canvas and ringside.

Both the 402 significant strikes Hill attempted and the 232 he landed are UFC records for 205-pounders, and the Fight of the Night bonus he picked up was his fourth performance-based extra in a row.

Teixeira immediately announced his retirement, claiming he'd been "too tough" for his own health.

As for Hill, once the tears subsided, the defiance returned.

Aimed particularly, he said, toward those who undervalued his mettle.

"How would they know because they don't do this s--t?" he said.

"They don't do this. They just sit and watch. They think they know. People think because they watch, they know something, but it's intangibles that they could never really see or know or anything about. People who have never even sniffed this level will make comments and say some goofy s--t out their mouth. They missed it."

But others, Hill said, particularly the would-be opponents, are well aware.

"There's a lot of people that make these assumptions," he said. "They don't know s--t.

"The fighters that have to step in there with me, it's long nights of thinking about me for them. There's worries and doubts thinking about me for them. Regardless of what anybody else says, the one that's got to step in there with me, he better know."

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Which begs the million-dollar, or at least several hundred-thousand-dollar, question:

Who's next?

The second- and third-ranked contenders, Magomed Ankalaev and Jan Błachowicz, fought to the aforementioned draw at UFC 282 in Las Vegas, while No. 4 Aleksandar Rakić is still rehabbing a knee injury suffered last May. Teixeira's retirement makes his holdover ranking at No. 5 a moot point, which prompted No. 6 Anthony Smith to suggest last week that it could be him who gets the first crack at Hill.

Still, ex-champ and fellow Teixeira conqueror Procházka remains entrenched in the No. 1 contender's position in spite of his shoulder injury, and Hill immediately answered "Jiří" when asked his choice for a first defense.

Not surprisingly, though, he haltingly concedes his potential foe—who stopped Teixeira in five rounds at UFC 275 last June—is not without merit, but he's not particularly impressed.

"He's big. He's got length. He's a flow fighter. He's unorthodox. He likes to throw a lot of explosive athletic things," Hill said. "But aside from that, nothing really.

"I've been asking for that fight for years now, just so I can expose this s--t."

And in doing so, he said, bolster a case for his own climb—up the pound-for-pound ladder.

"It feels like all my hard work paid off to earn my spot in history," Hill said.

"That's what the label of being champ or the title of being champ means to me. If we win the fight, that's building a legacy. Building my legacy, cementing my place in history, and now doing that against fighting the best fighters and taking them out."