How Bellator's Devon Brock became a fighter long before his MMA foray

The fighter in Devon Brock was reared from an early age.

Long before Bellator came calling for what marked his professional debut this past January, a young Brock was duking it out on the streets of Compton while his father repeatedly entered Johnny Law's crosshairs and his mother was out juggling multiple jobs in a struggle to provide for him and his brother. The Brock boys were often left to fend for themselves, but as the Bellator upstart recently told theScore, such was the norm in his Southern California stomping ground.

"At home it was just me and my brother, so we were kind of doing everything on our own as far as the household goes," Brock said. "Other than that, though, my mom was always working to put food on our table and keep the lights on and food in the refrigerator. But it was rough, growing up here, being a product of this environment, just a lot of fights, a lot of violence around here. It’s gotten a lot better, but it’s still kind of the same way around here.

"Pretty rough childhood to the average person looking at it, but down here, it’s pretty normal, I guess you could say."

While Brock still calls Compton home, he spent his formative years a couple hours northwest in Santa Maria, where the fights raged on, albeit for different reasons.

"Out here (Compton), it’s a predominantly black neighborhood that I stay in," he said. "Out there, I learned of racial violence, dealing with all of that."

In Santa Barbara County, stability proved hard to come by. Brock's scraps with fellow students got him ousted from every high school that took him in and eventually landed him in "probation continuation" at Fitzgerald Community School, where he found an unlikely mentor in one of his teachers.

"Sometimes, you’re just trying to live and don’t really pay attention ... are you really seeing the pattern of what’s going on with your life? Are you seeing the pattern of where it’s leading you?" Brock said.

"He just sat out, talked to me. He’d seen the trouble I was getting into, because at that school, after you get let out, the teachers kind of follow you up the street to make sure everything’s good because, remember, everybody’s there for a bad reason. So everybody there, I guess, in their words, is a bad kid. My name would get brought up a lot in certain situations and he kind of took notice."

The Fitzgerald guru - whose full name escapes Brock - provided the Compton product with welcome guidance and an outlet in organized basketball, as did his uncles, Yornell and Letroy Bolden, both of whom play pivotal roles in his life to this day. A refocused Brock soon returned to "regular school," but his calling lay south in the city that raised him.

Until last year, Brock's closest brush with regulated combat was a single session of hitting pads with a friend, but that all changed when he discovered The Movement Boxing & Fitness, which is just a stone's throw west of Compton. Brock soon caught the MMA bug and took the amateur circuit last May, compiling a 5-0 record before the year was out.

"I’d been took down in street fights, or slammed a couple guys, even threw a couple kicks before," he said. "But as far as paying attention to it and actually seeing it coming, I took a real interest in learning that way ... I could see the art in it."

The 22-year-old's prolific run earned him a call from Bellator to share the cage with fellow pro debutant Khonry Gracie - the spawn of MMA luminary and Brazilian jiu-jitsu ace Royce Gracie - in January at the Forum in his native Los Angeles. Now three months removed from the welterweight tilt that he took in a sweep of the scorecards, Brock - still a relative neophyte - admits he wasn't immediately aware that his opponent's last name was synonymous with MMA royalty.

"I’ll be totally honest with you, I knew of the Gracie family, but I was still out of the loop about how important the Gracie family is to MMA right now. I’d tell people on the street and they all doubted me," Brock said with a laugh. "They were all, 'You trying to fight a Gracie? Stay off the ground!'"

In his sophomore walk to the cage, Brock will meet another son of an MMA legend in Kevin Ferguson Jr. - whose late father, Kimbo Slice, knew a thing or two about street fights. The pair of prospects will square off in a 160-pound catchweight bout on the main card of Friday's Bellator 197 in St. Charles, Missouri.