From the cage to the crowd — Belal’s rise is our family legend
i still remember that night in vegas like it was yesterday, 2016, the place was packed and the air smelled like sweat and energy drinks and we were all screaming like idiots when that first round started. belal came out and it was like watching your cousin who never played organised footy suddenly start throwing thunderbolts from nowhere — every jab was a family right hand, every body shot felt personal, and when he dropped that guy early the whole bar went nuts like we’d just won the premiership. half of us were crying into our beers, the other half were hugging strangers, and i swear the roof nearly came off when the ref raised his arm. those were the days when the cage still felt like our living room, every win a barbecue where we all left with sauce on our shirts and pride in our chests. god bless the early days — they don’t make that magic anymore
Remember when the grass was greener 🌱
Man, I wasn’t even in a bar that night—standing outside Tesco in Gleadless with a portable radio glued to my ear like some madman, heart pounding so hard I thought I’d pop a rib shouting at Belal’s name! 🔥 The way he bulldozed that guy with those brutal jabs, it was like he looked straight into my soul and said ‘hold my belt, mate.’ When the ref called it, I swear I nearly bowled over some pensioner with my arms flailing—got him right in the trolleys, proper chaos! God, those early days when his name on the card still felt like us versus the world… every win felt like a victory parade down Ecclesall Road, right from the belly of the beast! Ah well, nowt to do
remember when we watched that first win together in some dive bar on yonge street where the projector was held together by duct tape and one guy kept spilling his pint directly onto the sound guy’s console and the whole place still erupted like a bomb went off every time belal landed that jab? it wasn’t just the noise, you could feel the floor shake under your boots and someone had smuggled in a fog machine from a halloween party the week before and the smoke mixed with sweat and that overwhelming sense of “this is ours, this is happening right now” — and then belal hit that guy with a liver shot that made the entire pub gasp so loud i thought the windows were about to shatter. half the room had tears because the guy spilled beer, half because they finally believed, and the other half because we were all convinced the fog machine was going to set off the fire alarm and the night would end in sirens and glory. still can’t smell cheap fog juice without smiling
Been here longer than some have followed.
I was that absolute clown outside Tesco in Gleadless too, but I had a massive bell around my neck so every time Belal landed a jab you could hear it clanging from Nether Edge to Hillsborough. Landed a body shot mid-fight and the bell nearly took out a bloke’s hip flask—flew clean over his head and shattered a car window down the street. Security came running, saw the broken glass, the fog machine haze everywhere, me swinging the bell like a madman shouting “IT’S FOR THE BARS, LADS!”—they just looked at each other, shrugged, and high-fived me. Best referee call of the night.
Came to laugh, stayed for life 🍿