Damien Anderson just made his professional MMA debut at Fury Challenger Series 9 on November 5th, 2023 and he won it in emphatic style, finishing the fight by TKO in the very first round. Anderson has been one of the top competitors training at B-Team Jiu-Jitsu for quite some time now, but he’s recently started developing his striking to transition to MMA. He’s got a huge amount of grappling experience but is still early in his MMA career at the moment and only had his first amateur fight at the beginning of 2023.
It was immediately clear that all the time he’d been spending working on his Muay Thai had been paying off, as he battered his opponent on the feet before finishing him with ground and pound. Anderson clearly didn’t want to waste any time sharpening his skills in competition, as he announced his intention to turn professional just a few months later. He was booked against another fighter making his professional MMA debut, Ray Vaiza, at Fury Challenger Series 9. Although neither of them had any professional experience, Vaiza had spent significantly more time as an amateur, with 9 fights over the last decade.
It became clear once the cage door closed that not wasting any more time on the amateur MMA circuit was the best decision for Anderson’s career. He ran through Vaiza and finished him in the first round, getting his professional career off to the perfect start. Although Anderson still spends time as one of the coaches at B-Team Jiu-Jitsu New Jersey, he is really focusing on developing his skills and excelling at MMA. It’ll be interesting to see where he goes from here and it shouldn’t be long at all before fans get to see him performing for one of the major MMA promotions.
UFC Fight Pass uploaded the footage of Damien Anderson winning his professional MMA debut at Fury Challenger Series 9 by TKO in the first round in a recent post to their official Instagram account:
