When he was 12 years old, Renato Moicano went to his father and told him what he wanted to be when he grew up.
“I told my father, ‘I want to be a UFC fighter’ and he laughed at me,” the Brazilian veteran said with a smile. “‘You’re never gonna do it. You don’t have it.’ I took that as a challenge, and everything I did was focused on that.”
Thirteen years after expressing his ambitions to his father, Moicano made his UFC debut with a second-round submission win over Tom Niinimaki, and he’s been a fixture on the roster ever since.