After a career of fighting, training and teaching all over the world, Yves Edwards has come back home with a mission. The retired Bahamian pro fighting legend is back in the first place in the U.S. he ever set roots – Houston, Texas – and he’s intent on developing a new generation of young fighters in the city where he began his own MMA career.
Speaking exclusively with The Underground for a career retrospective conversation, Edwards (42-22-1) details how he decided to move his family to Houston and how his passion for teaching has been reignited.
“These pieces started to fall together,” Edwards said. “Houston, man. That’s home. If I’m going to be in America, before I go back to the Bahamas, I’ve got to be in Houston.”
Edwards spent recent years traveling and helping out in the camps of some of the world’s elite fighters but recently decided that he wanted to design a full program of his own, where his considerable knowledge and experience could be put to use cultivating talent from the beginning.
“I started thinking that maybe I need to go back and do my own thing, get back in my own place,” Edwards said. “Teaching is one of those things that I kind of forgot that I had a real love for until doing it more.
“It wasn’t like I had stopped doing it. I had just focused on my friends and some of the guys at the highest levels – Mickey Gall, Dustin Poirier, Joe Schilling. But then it was like, ‘you guys are so good you just need a sprinkling of me.’”
Teaching beginners is a welcome change and challenge for Edwards. After all, becoming a world-class fighter isn’t just a vibe, it takes intricate and precisely applied technique, and Edwards revels in the technical details.
“Coming back here … starting with the young guys again, that’s a whole lot of fun for me,” he said, relishing the opportunity to help young athletes build their technical foundation. “It kind of blows my mind. Sometimes I watch these young guys go, and it’s like, ‘Oh man, he’s eager, he’s excited, and that’s good.’ But then we start breaking down technique and with some of the stuff, they aren’t there, yet. It’s over their head. They just don’t understand the concepts yet, and, it’s like, yeah – that’s a part of what teaching is about. It’s about getting these guys to understand how these pieces fit and the big picture.
“I really like seeing guys develop. Being back here is kind of a blessing, man.”
Edwards now runs an MMA program out of Heritage Muay Thai and is all-in with teaching. The “Thugjitsu” master and Brazilian jiu-jitsu black belt is now back in the gym every day, this time sharing his expertise with aspiring fighters.
The role might be particularly satisfying for Edwards considering when he and friends like the late Saul Soliz began their careers in Houston, they were met with racism-tinged derision. Back in his youth, Edwards says that “word around town was, ‘If you want to learn some good jiu-jitsu you go train with a guy like Aaron Williams or someone like that. But if you want to learn that Thugjitsu, then you go train with Yves and those guys.’ It was supposed to be a diss.”
Though dismissed early on as some non-technical, purely aggressive, and lower level of martial artist, Edwards co-opted the insult, reappropriated it as something he took pride in, and rode his underestimated technical skill far beyond the level any of his detractors ever achieved for themselves.
“Now that you ask that question in the way you asked it, I remember hearing that and being upset by it for a second and Saul was like, ‘Naw man, that’s cool. Take that name,’” Edwards said. “When he said it like that, I was like, ‘Yeah, Thugjitsu, I like that.’ I kind of embraced it.”
Edwards would become the top lightweight in the world at one point and did battle in every major organization of his time. He details some of the more colorful portions of that journey in the full video interview above, including memories of some of the first times he began cornering friends in their bouts and the lessons he learned from those events.
Though Edwards enjoyed helping coach elite fighter friends of his at the biggest camps in the sport of MMA, he says there’s something special about getting to work with someone from their start and seeing them succeed with tools you helped them forge. That’s what the 45-year-old’s goal is now, as a full-time coach, and why he’s back home in Houston – to help mold tomorrow’s champions out of a region he loves.
More than almost any coach a young fighter could work with, Edwards knows what it feels like – all of it. He’s ready to not just impart knowledge but also to share the rocky path of fighting with his new charges, come what may.
“If (my fighters now) were to lose a fight, ever, it’s going to hurt,” Edwards said. “That has to do with knowing what it’s like to be in there, knowing what it’s like to put into this, and knowing that feeling of joy and failure.
“The best feeling I ever got from fighting, aside from seeing somebody get their hand raised, is watching them succeed with something I put in their head or some technique that I gave to them. … I feel like I had a part in your growth as a human being.
“I want to help a lot of young guys and women get to the point where they believe they can do something they weren’t sure they could before that.”
