Jackson Glass walked to the cage and took a lap around the inside perimeter.
He eventually parked himself in the red corner and fidgeted with his gloves. He turned around to face his opponent. Standing across the cage from him was an opponent who was more than twice his age – but fighting grown men was nothing new for the 18-year-old.
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“My dad has always had me training with bigger, older guys,” Glass recently told MMA Junkie. “I’ve been doing adult classes since I was like nine or 10 years old, and obviously, the adults aren’t going hard on me when I’m that age. But I’m just used to going with adults. I’m sparring with adults, doing hard rounds with adults since I was a young kid, and it’s just always like, I don’t look at a 17-year-old any different than a 35-year-old. They might be tougher. They might be more experienced, but I’m just fighting another human at the end of the day.”
Glass was born in 2007 in New York, during the era of Anderson Silva, Georges St-Pierre, and Randy Couture. The UFC and MMA have been an established commodity for as long as he can remember.
He moved to Austin at three years old, and his father, a big combat sports fan, enlisted him in the jiu-jitsu gym that was just a couple of minutes down the road. Eventually, all of the martial arts were in the mix. It quickly became a family affair.
“When I was two weeks old, he took me into Mike Tyson’s gym,” Glass laughed. “I was just kind of born into it. He had boxed a lot and just from there, my family, we all kind of do a lot of the same stuff together. So, my whole family trains and we all basically just do it together.”
