Patricky Freire and the Birth of a Striker

A fortuitous injury long ago put former Bellator MMA lightweight champion Patricky Freire on a path separate from many of his peers, leading him to stardom as one of MMA’s true knockout artists.

“I don’t know exactly how to explain this, but there’s one thing I remember that I did a lot when I was starting out and wanted to fight vale tudo,” he told Sherdog.com. “I had a knee injury—my ACL. The only thing I could train was boxing, so I hung a punching bag in my garage. I hit that bag pretty much every day. Sometimes, I trained for the sake of training, and sometimes, I did it with a lot of anger because I couldn’t train jiu-jitsu.

“Often, when I was stressed or when I couldn’t train or got…