Admittedly, Trevor Peek had a tumultuous youth. He was constantly in trouble and getting into things that he shouldn’t been. While a lot of young men and women at that age find martial arts as a good way to right that ship, that was never really in the card for Alabama’s son.
“I had a good friend, we used to be really close, his name is Sam McAlpin. Him and a couple of my other buddies, they trained and stuff when we were in high school. I wasn’t ever financially able to train,” Peek said. “We was, all the time, fighting and he had a really good eye for talent.”
His close friend would go one to start his own MMA promotion using that sharp eye. However, long before that day, McAlpin would make a call that would change the future of the toubled youth, Peek/
“He called me and I fought in an unsactioned event on a days notice,” he recalled. “I was over at my dad’s house. That same buddy, he called me and said ‘hey man, you want to fight?’. And like I said, me and him used to go around fighting all kinds of people, and I’m like ‘yeah, man, who are we fighting?’ I was thinking we were going to a parking lot, you know?”
Peek and McAlpin weren’t going to a parking lot, or a bonfire (another place he admittedly had a lot of fights early on). Instead, an unsactioned MMA event was taking place the next day and they were looking for one more guy.
Still not 18 years old, Peek needed to get a signature from his dad in the other room. His dad was on board despite neither man having any clue where or who he’d be fighting.
“I ended up getting matched up with this kid – it was three brothers and me and my buddy got matched up with the middle and the youngest and the oldest brother was fighting in the main event,” Peek said. “They actually trained. They came from a family of martial artists.”
But despite the experience advantage being in favor of his opponent, the backyard style of Peek began to take over.
“That kid got started and I was throwing bombs. That’s all I knew how to do,” he said. “In the second round, he tried to throw up a triangle choke on me and my buddy’s coach, he was cornering me for it, he said ‘get out of it!”
Caught in the first real submission he’d ever been in, he did what his instincts told him to.
“I stood up with him and Rampage slammed him,” Peek said. “His mouthpiece went bouncing across the mat.”
Peek went on to beat the youngest of the three bothers. The rest, as they say, is history. More regular training in martial arts, together with finding God, helped him put his life together and make something of himself.
Now at 7-0, Peek looks to take a more measured aproach (albeit with some of that same recklessness) as he takes on Erick Gonzalez. That fight will be on the main card of UFC Vegas 70 this Saturday on ESPN+.
You can hear the entire audio of this interview below at 2:03.
