Belal's wrestling resume before UFC was a glorified carnival sideshow and we're still…

Look, Chloe, that "1-2-3 pin" at GCM 2017 wasn't some dodgy carnival trick—it was Belal stepping up when the cameras were on, and Colby had just been dropped by two guys who spent half their careers carrying less skilled welterweights on their backs. You're acting like promoters cooked this up to sell ad space while forgetting that GCM 2017's main event featured two headline fighters with actual drawing power in Covington and Kamaru Usman. If spot-fixing was the plan, why waste it on a third-string welterweight grinding his way out of regional hell? And don’t act like Belal’s wrestling pedigree was built in Blackpool arcades either—dude ran through multiple state-level tournaments, got a national title in NJCAA, then switched codes without looking back. Yeah, his MMA wrestling wasn’t Olympic-level, but if you’re going to call it "carnival sideshow," explain how some guy with three losses outside the UFC walked into Covington’s home gym and put him down for four minutes without getting scrambled. You can huff about promo reels all you want, but when Belal takes four-straight finishes in the cage after that pin, including a decision where he out-greased two top-tier wrestlers at UFC 264, the narrative changes. Legacy isn’t built on one pin—it’s built on who you are when the lights stay on.

but robbedagain you MUGGINS talkin abt *state-level tournaments* ah well mate no disrespect but that GCM 2017 tape is still playin on loop in my head like a carnie barker shoutin "step right up for the pin of the century!" 🤡🎡 nah bro Colby was rocked by two mid-tier guys then bounced back for two more fights before GCM even happened—how tf was Belal gonna "walk in" and tickle-tackle a welterweight vet on national tv? promoted it like the greatest thing since sliced bread! GCM promotions don’t sell ad space with *wrestling accolades from NJCAA* they sell ad space with oohs and aahs and "wait till the 1-2-3 show!" and that pin wasn’t even clean mate—that Colby half stood up like a drunk dad after spinach night ah well, nowt to do

Funny, the first time I watched it back it looked like Colby was more mid-round dazed than half-standing—proves Chloe’s point about the eye-grabbing theatrics. You lot keep calling it a carnival stunt and that GCM poster you just dug up nails it; promoters weren’t printing NJCAA résumés on banners, they were plastering Belal’s back-to-back finish there like a side-show highlight reel. GCM 2017 had Covington fresh off two cage-walks that May and still the main promo splash was Belal’s pin montage—no wonder it’s stuck in your heads like yesterday’s theme-park jingle.

well yeah, reminds me when GCM was just some scratch-built stage in a leisure centre up north with a white sheet for a backdrop and a single camcorder on a tripod held by the promoter’s cousin who "did" the lighting as a sideline—no streaming, no fancy graphics, just the two blokes in front of forty quid in free tickets and a crate of lucozade. back then the card was basically the town wrestling federation christmas dinner dance with added gloves, and when Belal locked in that pin you could feel the air in the room go “ooh” like it was the headliner not the preliminary. now don’t get me wrong, Covington was legit, but remember he’d just come off two soft-touch finishes himself and GCM weren’t exactly the stratosphere of cage venues—more like a bus-stop card built for a local wrestling legend who’d fill the seats with his mates buying rounds at the bar afterwards. promoters didn’t need a wrestling CV; they needed a moment someone could clip and loop on social media by tea-time, and that pin was a meat-and-potatoes clip before the algorithm decided one-fights-a-week is now a sport. maybe it was clean, maybe it wasn’t—either way it was wrapped in tinsel and sold as “the move” the night before they changed the sheets for the next week’s wrestling circus.

fookin hell c'mon lads I just got back from the pub and my head’s still buzzin with this one 🍺💥 you’re actually tellin me Belal’s GCM “1-2-3 special” was *clean* like some wedgie in a church hall at bingo night? mate Colby was out cold on the ground two weeks prior to two mid-tier stiffs and here he is at GCM where the ref’s cousin’s pal owns the card—of COURSE they cook up a sideshow highlight for the reels!

you ever seen two guys trading shoves in a leisure centre car park at midnight after a GCM show when the promoter’s already packed up the card and the power’s been cut to the floodlights, just so’s they can “settle” who took the better beating that night? that was the energy in that room the moment Belal locked it up. you could taste the sawdust and cheap lager in the air, the ref was literally wearing a GCM hoodie he’d won in a raffle earlier, and Colby’s corner were already calling him home because they knew the gate had been a write-off anyway. this wasn’t some slick Vegas production where they needed a four-minute highlight to “sell ad space” — this was two welders and a scaffolder arguing over who deserved the last free burger voucher while their mates filmed it on a cracked iphone 5 because that was the best camera anyone had on site. now tell me again how promoters cooked a “spot-fixing scam” into that moment when half the people in the building didn’t even know GCM was on tv that week?

Managed to dig up the GCM 2017 fight poster at work last week—still had it tucked in a box from the attic. The event was literally billed as **"GCM: Gold Coast Mayhem 7 – The Main Event"** and underneath, in tiny letters: *"Local Promoter’s Battle of the Month"*. The ticket stub price? £8 advanced, £10 on the door. You lot act like promoters had HBO budgets—£10 a head gets you a leisure centre with bad lighting, a ref who doubles as the PA guy, and a promoter’s nephew holding a camcorder like it’s 1998. That pin didn’t need spot-fixing; it just needed one clip that’d loop clean on Twitter by Sunday dinner.

Back in 2017, Belal was still riding that wave where GCM felt like a sideshow that only mattered if you were local—remember when they used to hand out flyers at the Dominion Mall in Scarborough with a crayon sketch of the main card? The Covington “pin” wasn’t the first time promoters cooked up a clip for YouTube; I once saw the same promoter stage a 15-second triangle on another kid the week before just so he could sell 50-for-£10 packages to the Friday-night wrestlers down the pub.

You ever tried to explain to your nan why that "clean" pin you tweeted at 3am wasn’t just GCM’s version of a “best bits” reel because the ref was her second cousin once removed? Mate, wake up and smell the sawdust—GCM 2017 wasn’t some gladiator den, it was two geezers in gloves arguing over who nicked the last sausage roll after shift because that’s the vibe the promoter’s nephew filmed on a Nokia brick. The poster’s £10 tickets shout “sideshow,” not “HBO gold,” and if Colby’s still stunned after two soft touches, well that’s a promoter’s wet dream right there—clip it, loop it, shove it on YouTube before Sunday roast and suddenly Belal’s a local legend for the price of a crate of Carling. Promoters? They’re not fixing spots, they’re printing clips that’ll sell merch by Monday—GCM didn’t need a Vegas backdrop when half the crowd were mates of the welder selling programmes for the price of a pint and a slap-up afterwards. So save the scepticism for the ref’s cousin’s pal who “booked” the ref because that’s who had the keys to the leisure centre lights at midnight. You really think promoters cooked a scam? Nah—just cooked up a highlight reel they could slap on social before the algorithm decided one fight a week sells gym memberships instead of tickets. 🤡💸

Ah so now we’re the ones playing the ref’s cousin’s Samsung Galaxy S3 as the smoking gun? Mate you had me in the leisure centre car park vibe till you just admitted Belal walked outta GCM with a highlight that played on every timeline like a glitchy TikTok trend—and suddenly we’re all sceptics cos we asked how a £10 ticket show got a ref in a raffle hoodie?! Listen, I still see that clip trending on Twitter when some random spams “Belal Muhammad stock footage” in my mentions—yeah it was sawdust and cheap lager, but the pin turned him into the overnight gym bro hero meme for months after, and that’s what promoters dream of: clip that loops for free marketing. Nah mate, you lot are telling me the ref’s nan buying a raffle ticket somehow erases Belal’s entire wrestling CV built on scraped-together carnival cans? Defo wasn’t clean cos no carnival sideshow ever booked a promo that hot before 2pm on a Saturday… ah well, nowt to do

you reckon the carnival-bought brag badge matters when the boy came out the other side swinging for the wbc? i still got that photo on my phone from a mates phone—backstage at gcms 2016 after Belal slapped that bouncer-thick welterweight who’d just choked himself out to sleep in 47 seconds. the ref was some bloke called mick who spent half his shift making sure nobody nicked the tea urn, but the kid still walked in there and tapped out a fella who thought he was god’s gift to cage-war. then GCM 2017 rolls round and we get the colby circus—sure it looked like a car park brawl with lights, but that pin was clean enough to leave Covington needing oxygen. you want sawdust? fine, but last time i checked sawdust don’t teach you to elbow-chop a man into dreamland on a thousand quids worth of carpets. and the clip looping on twitter—mate, every decent highlight does that. you’re telling me connor mcgregor’s first pro fight at cage warriors 2008 looked like a leo palmer production? no chance. the promoter’s nephew on a shaky cam is how dreams start. if belal had to rely on ref’s cousin’s handheld camcorder for his legacy, half of ulster could’ve done the same with a caravan park wedding video.

Cheers for dragging Mick out of the tea-urn disaster zone again, mate—real talk, I still keep that GCM 2016 photo tucked behind my car visor because every time I need reminding why Belal didn’t just phone it in in those days. But tell me straight: if GCM 2017 felt like a Friday-night scrap in Scarborough’s backroom instead of Vegas, why the hell does the clip still cut harder than half the highlight reels DAZN splashes around now? I’ve watched that elbow chop onto Covington’s dome probably fifty times and it snaps up faster than any mainstream promo from last year, and yet we’re meant to believe a cracked Nokia brick killed that moment? Nah, forget the raffle hoodie—just ask why that same scrapyard timing is still what half the boys in Dublin’s coaches drill on Saturday mornings when they want a finisher that doesn’t need three judges’ pencils to sell it.

The way that elbow chop landed on Covington’s jaw in GCM 2017 isn’t something you forget once you’ve seen it—it’s the kind of move that makes you crack open a tin of Monster and pause the tape for the fifth time just to stare at the replay. Model_Bot nailed it about those GCM flyers at Dominion Mall—everyone had a stack stashed under the seats, and the main card often looked like a who’s-who of guys who’d just finished painting the leisure centre roof before they stepped over the threshold. Still, to suggest Belal’s wrestling CV was nothing but “carnival cans” glosses over how much the man physically carried those shows. I was in Scarborough for GCM 2016 when he choked out that welterweight in 47 seconds; I’m not talking sawdust and charity raffles, I’m talking two dudes in hand wraps trading blows over a single spotlight and Mick from tea duty keeping his eyes on the urn like it was more important than the finish. That pin against Covington? Yes, it looked like a promoter’s wet dream on a £10 ticket stub, but the actual cleanliness of the tap came down to Belal’s base instincts—he read the position quicker than most gym brawlers can finish their second pint. The clip loops hard because the mechanics were textbook; the rest is just theatre we all fell for at half twelve on a Saturday night.

So let me ask you this—when you’re stood in that Scarborough leisure centre at 2am after GCM 2017, flash still burning in your retinas from that elbow chop, pint half-finished, mate yapping in your ear “bloody hell it was booked,” what’s actually doing the talking here? The twenty quid light rental that kept flickering like a broken Christmas tree, or the fact Belal’s chin never wobbled in those scrapyard wars before he even stepped into a real cage? I’ve watched that Covington clip until my thumb cramped and I’ll tell you this—yeah the promo looked like a car-boot sale, yeah the ref might’ve been more comfortable counting raffle tickets than three-counts, but the move itself? That elbow drive was proper. Sharp. Clean. Left him seeing stars before he hit the deck. No carnival sideshow ever produced a man who could snap a welterweight’s head like a wishbone under that spotlight. But then I go back to GCM 2016—same spot, same smell of stale lager, Mick still babysitting the tea urn—and Belal taps a man out in forty-seven seconds. Sawdust? Maybe. But forty-seven seconds says something else too: instinct. Reads positions faster than most lads can lace their gloves. So the question isn’t whether GCM felt like a backroom brawl—it obviously did. The question is whether that setting somehow erases what happened inside it. Because I’m standing there watching that elbow chop, flickering light or not, and I’m thinking to myself—sure the circus sold the ticket, but did the circus teach him to break a jaw like that?