Alex Pereira is a titled kickboxer who first became a double champion of the top organization Glory, and at the age of 35 he became a UFC title holder. On Sunday morning, the Brazilian will fight for the belt against Israel Adesanya, whom he defeated twice in Glory.

Before the high-profile tournament, we remembered Pereira's thorny path to the top. A path in which he fought not only rivals, but also inner demons.

Pereira left school at 12 and became an alcoholic. He worked in a store, drank rum with adults every day and fought a lot

Now Pereira looks like an athlete: under two meters https://mostbet-az-90.com/aviator/ and with perfect muscles, Alex is as if carved from stone. However, the Brazilian has not always been an athlete. Moreover, already in childhood, Pereira suffered from alcoholism. Born into an extremely poor family, Alex was forced to survive in the favelas from the first days of his life. And at the age of 12, he left school and went to work in a shop at a car repair shop.

Pereira, as a child, got into a team of adult men, which changed his life. Already at the age of 13, Alex began to drink a lot every day. After work, he drank rum with colleagues, although he was a minor:

At the age of 12, I decided that school was not for me. I found a job at a tire shop that also offered some mechanics on the side. I dragged 10 hours a day of tires smeared with oil and mud. The store was staffed by a large team of people who were constantly refreshed with cachaça Brazilian sugarcane rum.

They drank it constantly to get through the whole day. At first the taste of alcohol repulsed me, then I learned to tolerate it, and then I developed a taste for it. I began to drink like my shopmates.

By the age of 16, I was drinking a liter of rum a day, sometimes mixing it with beer. I turned into an alcoholic, a heavy alcoholic. It was just a normal lifestyle for everyone who worked at that tire shop. We drank after work too.

The older Pereira got, the more he fought. After work, Alex hung out in bars and clubs, where he again drank and fought several times a night:

Due to alcohol and my lifestyle, I began to get into conflicts and fights. More often than not, I won these fights through innate strength and instincts. But I was suddenly fascinated by the idea of learning how to fight for real. So at the age of 21 I got into kickboxing. This decision changed my life, kickboxing opened up a part of me that I didn't know about before.

Pereira became a successful kickboxer, but he didn't quit alcohol. Love for the people and religion helped him suffer from addiction

Despite his success in kickboxing, Pereira trained and drank for a long time. In 2012, after three years of kickboxing, Alex became the champion of Brazil, but still drank alcohol. It was an addiction. I wanted to stop, but I could not, the fighter admits.

However, at some point, Pereira realized that this could not continue. The fighter studied his pedigree and found out that he was one hundred percent Brazilian without any admixture of African or European roots. This filled Alex with love for his people and origin, which helped him to quit alcohol:

There is nothing Brazilian-European or Brazilian-African about me. Both of my parents come from tribes that lived on this land before outsiders came to it. It so happened that when I got into the kickboxing gym, there were only such guys, purebred Brazilians.

I began to learn more and more about this, about my origin, and it made me more spiritual, closer to my bloodline. From the indigenous Brazilian language Tupi, my nickname Po Atan translates as Stone Hand. Po is a hand, and Atan is something like a stone, dense and strong.