
Par Guillaume K. | Sports journalist
This is something few fans know, but before getting into mixed martial arts at the professional levell, GregMMA had the ambition to become a sports teacher. In a recent interview, he made a dry observation about education.
GregMMA often repeats it in his videos or in his various interviews: he may take blows to the head all day long, but he nonetheless remains a very intelligent person. This is the reason why he regularly uses strong language, and it is also what explains his numerous historical or philosophical knowledge.
On the microphone of the show “Small Talk” Konbini, the French MMA star revealed to his fans the origin of his science. He quickly detailed his university career, before making a rather dry observation on the state of teaching today. He is undoubtedly not the only one to share this rather pessimistic vision of things:
GregMMA would have liked to have been a teacher before fighting
I have a university degree in STAPS, it’s quite strong. It was hard. It was necessary to work but it was only by heart, so everything that was anatomy and physiology I mastered. It still interested me, until the day I was on an internship in a primary school… I said to myself: “But what are these monsters that I’m going to have to educate?! “. I realized that I didn’t want to do this my whole life.
The teachers have enormous courage, bravo to them. The students are mentally ill. I remember learning something that stuck with me, it was about anthropomorphism. I don’t know why it was notable. In STAPS we also learned things about the life of young ducks and their sense of smell.
Passionate about physical activity since his early childhood, GregMMA completed a STAPS license with the intention of becoming a sports teacher… And then during an internship in a primary school, even though the students are not yet the most virulent in this age group, he understood that he would not last a lifetime in this context.
At the time, he considered the students as “monsters”, “sick”, which confirms that he was right to change path. If everything had gone well for him, he might never have become GregMMA, he might not entertain hundreds of thousands of subscribers every week on YouTube, which would have been a shame.
Instead of becoming the star of a YouTube channel and an organization like Hexagon, GregMMA could have been a sports teacher in a middle or high school. Fortunately for his fans, he was traumatized from his first internship.