At the recently held Bodypower Expo, the largest Mixed Martial Arts festival in India, 25-year-old Zeeshan Syed from Hyderabad won the gold medal in Amateur Welter Weight title (75-80 kg). The festival was in Mumbai and featured some of the greatest Indian and International fighters.
Zeeshan is trained by coach Shaik Khalid, the General Secretary of Telangana Association of Mixed Martial Arts (TAMMA). He has created many national champions in amateur and professional categories from Telangana.
Zeeshan has worked hard in a short period of time while hiding the stint from his family. “I have been training on and off for about a year now, but to participate in the championship, I had to prepare for three months,” he says. Coming from an engineering background, Zeeshan, aka Syed Saroosh Hassan (professional name) didn’t inform his family about his passion for fighting as he says they would never have agreed. “My family didn’t know that I was training because they would have been too scared that I would get hurt. I informed them only a week before I was going to Mumbai to participate. My mother was shocked, her only concern was my safety,” says Zeeshan.
Zeeshan is trained by coach Shaik Khalid, who has created many national champions in amateur and professional categories from Telangana
The scope of development of the sport is immense in Hyderabad. Khalid has been promoting the sport since 2014. “The sport has caught the fancy of the city’s youth but the seriousness which is required to excel at international level is still lacking. But, I am hopeful,” says Khalid. Opportunities are many and fighters get recognised soon in this sport.
As the name suggests, the sport is a mixture of wrestling, boxing, judo, and muay thai, borrowing the most useful aspects from each of the traditional martial art form. “The concept of mixed martial arts started in 1980s and moves like striking, clinching and grappling are taken from different martial art forms,” he informs. To compete in a national championship, one should at least train for three months.
At the Bodypower Expo, the team from Telangana stood second in medal tally and Khalid is hopeful that Hyderabad will reach the top soon. “There is the annual Super Fight League which is a franchise-based league featuring eight teams for mixed martial arts. Even though there are players from Telangana fighting it out in the league, there is no home team. I am working towards creating one by the next season,” says Khalid.
