Lightweight champion claims his biggest victory over drugs
Jared Gordon has always been focused on MMA. Gordon was born and raised in Queens, New York and he started boxing and wrestling at a young age. He was obsessed MMA when he was in high school. Unfortunately, he also became obsessed with drugs as well, eventually going in and out of rehab 10 times and suffering 3 nearly fatal overdoses.
As reported at MMAFighting.com, Gordon’s final overdose was what pushed him towards becoming clean once and for all.
He’s lucky to be alive. And he’s hoping to achieve notoriety in the UFC, so he can deliver his message of hope to people who are struggling with addiction.
“I want to fight and make a living and yeah, fame is great and money, obviously you need money,” Gordon told Ariel Helwani on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour. “I want to become champion, that’s a goal of mine, obviously. If you don’t want to become champion and you’re in the sport, you’re probably not gonna make it far.
“That’s what I want to do in the short term, but what I really want to do is do that so I can get the message out.”
After the third overdose, when he saw the looks on his parents’ faces, Gordon said he made the choice to stop using drugs. He would check himself into rehab again and this time he wouldn’t relapse.
“At that point, it was just black and white to me,” Gordon said. “I was either gonna keep getting high and die or go to prison or I was gonna live a normal life and get healthy and better.”
At that point, Gordon was already 9-1 in MMA, all while using drugs. When he was training at the Blackzilians gym in Florida, detectives came to arrest him after he allegedly broke into the house of a drug dealer and stole money. It was an endless cycle of drugs, criminal behavior and doing things that even then he knew was beneath him, including panhandling on the streets of New York City.
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To read more about Jared Gordon’s fight with addiction, please visit MMAFighting.com.