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Patricky Freire and the Birth of a Striker

A fortuitous injury long ago put former Bellator MMA lightweight champion Patricky Freire on a path separate from many of his peers, leading him to stardom as one of MMA’s true knockout artists.

“I don’t know exactly how to explain this, but there’s one thing I remember that I did a lot when I was starting out and wanted to fight vale tudo,” he told Sherdog.com. “I had a knee injury—my ACL. The only thing I could train was boxing, so I hung a punching bag in my garage. I hit that bag pretty much every day.