Late last October I visited the Denver area to observe UFC welterweight star Matt Brown’s training camp for a few days at the Factory X gym. Because of its celebrated reputation and track record of helping mold scores of elite fighters, Factory X is often filled with both visiting athletes and those who have moved their lives to Colorado simply to be a part of the team.
I met several such individuals during my brief stay there, last fall, and this spring I checked back in with one of the younger and newer faces I spoke with back then – Justin Osborn. When we first met, Justin told me he’d come from Alabama to visit Factory X and interview for jobs, with his mind towards a possible move to the Rocky Mountain state.
By April, the rising amateur MMA champion and former college football player was able to recount a successful past five months or so in Colorado. He’d made the cross-country move, scored a prestigious internship in his field at the Landow Performance personal training center, joined Factory X, and won his next bout.
The 24-year-old explained his motivation for moving his entire life from Alabama and starting anew in a brand-new place. Both the internship at Landow Performance and the chance to train at Factory X seemed to influence the athlete’s decision.
It was a little of both, he said. I got my degree in exercise science and kept getting interviewed for jobs but told I didn’t yet have enough experience, even though I’d had internships in college. So, I figured what better place to get professional experience than at the best strength and conditioning facility out there, Landow Performance.
In terms of fighting, sometimes you just need something a little bit different. It wasn’t that my team in Alabama wasn’t good – they are. It was more that Alabama’s culture wasn’t a good fit for me. I’m very loose, happy-go-lucky, and there are a lot of uptight people there, very set in their ways. One of the things that was scary to me about Alabama is how they don’t fund education enough. I’m really lucky that my little brother goes to one of the few very good schools in the state. For example, the state doesn’t have a lottery. I do lean to the left on most issues, and that was one issue that affects the state. People will drive to Mississippi and Florida to get lotto tickets and gamble. All that money being spent in other states could be used for education funding in Alabama.
It doesn’t take very long speaking to Osborn to realize that he busts many stereotypes widely held not just about fighters, but about young people as well. In a matter of a few seconds, the bright young fighter can seamlessly move in topic from physiology, to mixed martial arts technique, to education funding, morality in society, and politics, and not sound ill at ease discussing any of them.
Osborn moved to Alabama for college and says he enjoyed so much about his years there. In the end, however, the state jumped the shark a bit for him, so to speak.
It was crazy during the Senate election. Doug Jones won and everybody was talking about it being a major upset, he continued, bringing up the sadly surreal 2017 Alabama senate race where Doug Jones narrowly defeated disgraced former judge Roy Moore, who didn’t deny dating underage girls and who faces many allegations of sexual misconduct and assault.
How can this be an upset? When Roy Moore did what he did, how can that be an upset? It took so many allegations for people to go to the other side of the aisle. One [allegation] is enough for me. It took three or four allegations of being one of the worst things you can be. People like that, I can’t be around. Living there ran its course. I got my degree, and did what I had to do.
So far, Justin finds Colorado’s environment to be a good fit for his personality and interests. I love it, he enthused.
I love how the community is very active, physically active. Everybody has some type of physical activity they like to do, whether it’s skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, and I really like that aspect of the state. People like to get outside. That’s important. I like to play video games, too, and draw, but getting outside and being active, generally, is important to me.
Justin clearly acts on things he deems important to his life, including his aspiration of becoming a professional MMA fighter. While it isn’t uncommon for rising pro fighters to eventually switch camps to advance their careers, it is not at all commonplace for amateur fighters just starting out in the sport to show the type of commitment that picking up one’s entire life and moving thousands of miles away demonstrates.
Osborn says that he knew he loved mixed martial arts from the first kick I threw, and it didn’t take the former football player long to know that his new love was worthy of his maximum possible attention and effort. What I see from the amateur level specifically is guys letting things get in their way, whether it’s work, or school, he detailed.
I did a lot of amateur fighting when I was going to college and classes certainly can get you down when you’re balancing the two. It’s about having the ability to look at your situation and say, ‘how am I going to make this work?’ Either you want this or you don’t want this. There is no in between.
I think it is very eye-opening for my teammates and coaches, even though our amateurs are all very dedicated, to see a guy who is still an amateur make a move like this.
Osborn said he’s learning a bit of the type of schedule it takes to be a pro fighter, while training at Factory X. It’s about getting used to the lifestyle of being a pro, he continued.
I have a good schedule here but it’s also about the work you put in all by yourself, when no one is watching. Literally, the times when you’re by yourself hitting the bag or shadow boxing. I’ve always been that way. I’ve always been the guy who gets kicked out of the gym last every night.
Justin certainly seems to love his new training home, Factory X, where he describes the owners and coaches as fully committed to what they are doing. The personal touch he gets at the large gym seems to go a long way for the young fighter.
If I ever need to call or text [coach] Marc Montoya, he gets right back to me the same day, Osborn said.
That means a lot to me. It’s one of the biggest reasons I chose them. I called different gyms in Colorado and didn’t get a call back from most of them. Not only did I get a call back from Factory X, but Marc Montoya himself called me back. This guy has a lot of integrity.
Osborn’s overall love affair with MMA is also in full bloom, despite the normal tough realities of being a working person attempting to both make ends meet and pursue a passion. I love the individual nature of the sport, he went on.
There’s no bulls*** with MMA. There’s no, ‘oh we lost the game because the referee threw this penalty down, took this touchdown away from us.’ it’s all you and you win, lose, or draw. You have to have personal accountability for what happened, that night. Maybe it was my diet, or you didn’t train as hard as I could have or maybe I didn’t watch as much as much film as I should have.
I like that you have to take personal responsibility in MMA. For example, if I’m getting caught in a move constantly, like an armbar, I have to ask myself why I’m getting there. Is there a way I’m moving? Is it because my elbows are flared out? Why does this keep happening to me? If I have a problem checking low-kicks, what do I need to do to fix the problem?
Osborn is a thinking man, and as much interest and thought as he puts into athletics, his profession and education funding, as examples, there is yet another issue-set that he is devoted to raising awareness and deepening understanding of in society. As a person with autism, Osborn would like to help people better understand the autistic spectrum, and have even leading autism organizations, and society at large, change the way it thinks of people on the spectrum and autism itself.
There are a few things I want to get across that I think the general public doesn’t even know about, he settled in.
Number one, perhaps the biggest thing is that people who are made aware of autism are not being made aware of the right things associated with it. For example, I saw on the news this one time where they covered an autistic child that had a breakdown. You might be able to find this out there if you look up, ‘Elmo mom.’ This mother made a video of her child having a breakdown. She was brought on ‘The Today Show’, later. The video is mostly the mother crying in a car. She took her child in a car to see Elmo and her son was freaking out. Throughout the whole video she said how there was never going to be a time where everything would be ok, and what was she going to do.
Some kids might not be interested in seeing Elmo. And that’s not what autism is. When I was a kid at a basketball game, the horn sound freaked me out. People with autism can have sensory overload that can cause meltdowns. Your brain doesn’t really have a filter. There’s connectivity between neurons of the brain that transmits signals from one neuron to the next neuron. When someone with autism has hyper-connectivity they have so much going on that, as a child, they might not be mentally mature enough to understand how to work in those situations, how to operate their brain.
’Elmo mom’ was blaming autism, but it’s not really about that. Her son has to mature. Nobody can teach you how to use your brain. You have to learn yourself.
Osborn can remember specific times where he himself had to, through trial and error and analysis and new trials, had to learn how to best operate his own brain, as he terms it, growing up. When I was growing up, every time I would put things in a folder, I would lose it. So, eventually I stopped that and learned that if I made special compartments for my homework, I wouldn’t lose it, he detailed.
When I was first learning to drive, I was terrible. I couldn’t figure out for a long time what was going on. Eventually, I learned that I had anxiety while driving and that when I turned off the radio, I drove just fine. It was just that I couldn’t focus on the road and hearing the radio at the same time. There’s learning how to navigate the waters, learning how to adapt on your own.
What happens is a lot of times parents freak out about their kids because they don’t know what’s going on and it seemed like a little bit of an overreaction on the mother’s part. I hate that stories like that get put out there.
There are many stories of autistic people that never reach the wider public, Osborn contends. The creator of Pokemon [Satoshi Tajiri] is on the spectrum. Dan Akroyd is on the spectrum. Albert Einstein showed signs of autism. There are a lot of success stories that people aren’t made aware of. People with autism can be successful, he insisted.
Osborn also bristles at the misconception that autism diminishes people’s intellectual capacities. The other part with autism is that it is not an intellectual disability, he said.
What ends up happening is that sometimes people with autism have a co-existing condition. So, you can be autistic and mentally retarded or intellectually disabled, but autism itself is not an intellectual disability. That’s not to say that people who are intellectually disabled are in any way less valuable but it’s important to be clear about conditions we talk about. Sometimes I do online gaming and you’ll hear other players remark when a player makes a bad decision, ‘oh that player is autistic. The reason people say that is because they are often shown through media depictions of autism that it is bad, it is some boogeyman.
Osborn also believes that even so-called autism advocate groups like Autism Speaks, which he is sharply critical of, can be guilty of a subtle but powerful transgression when talking about it, and that is treating autism as something that should be cured, or weeded out of society. Instead, Osborn says he and others want to see society accept autistic people as they are, keeping in mind that all humankind is diverse, neurologically, without thinking of them as degraded persons, or people with a condition that needs to be wiped out.
When it comes to autism, society needs to change, not people with autism.
We have to stick up for what we believe in and for what we want from society. We’re not asking for anything crazy, he explained.
Every building you go into these days has ramps. And that’s a great thing. Imagine if you asked those people in wheelchairs who need ramps to take stairs. That’s kind of what is going on with autism and social interactions. I never really looked at my teachers when they lectured me, so they’d often snap at me, they thought to get my attention, and ask, ‘Justin, what did I just say?’ Then, I’d repeat back everything they had just said. Just because somebody is not looking at you or making eye-contact, doesn’t mean they’re not paying attention. They’re just doing it in a way that makes sense for their brain.
Society should accept differences in race, gender, religious backgrounds, and neurological differences. There are differences in different people’s brains, and differences in how different people interact. I think that oftentimes society doesn’t want to accept differences in how people interact.
A society ignorant of and callous to the legitimate needs of autistic people is no symbolic sin, either. There are real and tragic consequences to the types of intolerance Osborn speaks of.
85 percent of autistic adults who graduated college are unemployed, though 100% of all people with autism are employable, he stated.
The number two cause of death in the autism community is suicide. If you have autism, you’re three times more likely to commit suicide than if you’re not autistic. Autistic people are not being accepted into society. They feel that ‘nobody understands me,’ they can’t get work, and then they can shut down and they don’t know what else they can do. Think about how that would feel – thinking ‘society doesn’t want to be around me, I’m going to be by myself forever.’ Society doesn’t accept you, you can’t get employed, you don’t feel accepted by your workplace if you do get a job. You can think, ‘well, if this is going to be my whole life, I might as well end it right now.’
‘Yes, autistic people don’t need as much social interaction as some other people, but we still need social interaction, someone to call a friend. We still need people to talk to that aren’t our family.
Osborn wants to continue to advocate for acceptance of people with autism as he pursues his MMA career, and hopes to turn more attention to the cause once he hangs up his gloves. One of the things I’d like to do when I’m done fighting is start a non-profit organization to help autistic individuals get jobs so that they can gain monetary independence and be able to get those social interactions from the outside that we all need, he said.
Osborn is able to do all that he has and does, in large part, because he has a supportive family who wouldn’t accept society’s classification of their son, he says. I was diagnosed at the age of three and did not speak until the age of five. I didn’t learn that I was autistic until the fourth grade, he remembered.
I learned because kids told me at school. I was in regular class like any other kid but then I was put into special education. I could tell right away that I didn’t need to be in special education, and I asked, ‘why am I in these classes? In this classroom we’re doing things I already know how to do. All the other kids at my old classroom get to learn different things.’ I told my parents that I wanted to be in back in classes with the other kids because I wanted to learn new things, and they went in and stood up for me.
It does a lot for your confidence to know that your parents believe in you. A lot of parents of autistic children tend to have a victim’s mentality. ‘Oh, why did I have this child that’s autistic? What am I going to do? They won’t be able to take care of themselves.’ No, we can be great. Even though we’re autistic, we can still be great at things. My parents believed that about me. They said, ‘he has potential. He can do great things in society. We’re going to believe in him and whatever hard times he goes through, we’ll be there.’ It’s huge to have parents like that.
I want to see autism acceptance, not awareness. Accept us into society and move forward.
About the author:
Elias Cepeda is a host of Sports Illustrated’s Extra Rounds Podcast, a staff writer at FloCombat, and has a regular column for The UG Blog.
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