The UFC welterweight, Seok Hyeon Ko, traded fight shorts for a wedding suit, but his Havas MMA teammates weren’t about to let him get married without making him throw a few punches first.
Seok Hyeon Ko has walked into plenty of stressful situations.
MMA fights. Tournaments. Training camps. Sparring sessions with people actively trying to punch him in the face.
Apparently, none of that completely prepares you for putting on your wedding suit.
In the latest Havas MMA YouTube video, Ko is preparing for a very different kind of big day: his wedding.
And because this is Havas MMA, there was absolutely no chance they were going to let him have a completely normal one.
Before we get to the part where a professional UFC fighter is forced to shadowbox his way toward his bride, though, the episode gives us a surprisingly sweet look at how far Ko and the people around him have come together.
First Problem: MMA Fighters Don’t Own Enough Suits
The video begins shortly before the wedding, with Ko heading out for the final fitting of his custom suit.
His longtime coach is getting one too, which creates its own problem.
He admits he hasn’t really worn a suit since his own wedding four or five years earlier—and after gaining more than 10 kilograms since then, the old ones aren’t exactly waiting patiently in the closet for another opportunity.
So the fighters do what fighters apparently do when they have finally exhausted their collection of rash guards and gym clothes:
They get properly dressed.
Once Ko puts on his wedding suit, however, something changes.
Until that point, he says the wedding hadn’t completely felt real. He knew he was getting married, obviously, but putting on the suit finally gives him that moment of:
Oh. I’m actually getting married.
And if you know anything about Ko’s story, seeing him standing there in a wedding suit means a little more to the people around him than simply watching one of their fighters get married.
Before the UFC, There Was a CrossFit Gym
The best part of the episode might actually happen on the drive.
Ko and his coach start reminiscing about how they met.
It was roughly 11 years ago, and Havas wasn’t yet the MMA team people recognize today.
In fact, Ko’s coach wasn’t even running an MMA gym.
The facility was essentially a CrossFit gym when a young Seok Hyeon Ko—coming from a judo background—showed up and asked if he could learn how to fight.
So they started training.
That’s it.
No sophisticated prospect-development system.
No UFC ambitions being mapped out on a whiteboard.
Just a young fighter asking a young coach if he would teach him MMA.
His coach remembers grappling with Ko and immediately thinking that part wasn’t going to be the problem.
Ko could grapple.
He needed to learn how to punch.
So he had him spend hours working on shadowboxing and striking fundamentals.
Then they started entering competitions.
One month of training?
Ko won.
Another month?
He entered a heavyweight striking tournament.
He won that too.
Apparently Seok Hyeon Ko has always been Seok Hyeon Ko.
Train, Work, Sleep on the Gym Floor, Repeat
The UFC still wasn’t anywhere on the horizon.
After finishing his military service, Ko was working a contract job assisting with enforcement involving overloaded commercial trucks.
He would work during the day and then head to training at night.
Sometimes he was so tired that he would arrive at the gym and sleep for about 30 minutes before getting up to train.
And yes, his coach says photographic evidence of these naps still exists.
Looking back now, even Ko’s coach seems slightly confused by how all of this happened.
He was only around 29 himself.
He didn’t have an MMA gym.
Ko somehow found him anyway.
And for whatever reason, the two trusted each other.
His coach says Ko’s willingness to follow him actually pushed him to become better. If this kid trusted what he was teaching, he felt responsible for studying more and becoming the coach Ko needed.
So when he looks back on those 11 years, he doesn’t really describe it as a coach building a fighter.
He describes it as something they did together.
They grew together.
Which brings us back to the wedding.
Because the first MMA student he ever coached was about to get married.
There was only one appropriate way to celebrate.
Embarrass him.
Of Course They Made Him Shadowbox Down the Aisle
Ko reportedly begged them not to do this.
Multiple times.
They did it anyway.
During the ceremony, his coach explains that married life isn’t always going to be happiness and good times. There will inevitably be hardships waiting for the newlyweds.
So naturally, those hardships needed to be dealt with the way Havas MMA deals with most problems.
Punch them.
Ko is instructed to treat the wedding aisle as all of the future adversity waiting for him in married life.
His mission?
Shadowbox his way through it.
Then reach the other side and loudly tell his bride that he loves her.
Remember: this is a man who fights professionally in a cage.
And apparently this was embarrassing enough that he repeatedly asked his coach to reconsider.
No luck.
The groom starts moving.
The hands come up.
And Seok Hyeon Ko proceeds to fight his imaginary opponents all the way down the aisle while the wedding guests cheer him on.
Somewhere, an imaginary opponent lost a very important decision.
Havas MMA Is Growing Up
Once the joke is over, though, there’s something genuinely nice about watching the rest of the wedding.
Teammates appear throughout the video. Longtime Havas members are there. People travel from Busan. Coaches and fighters who have spent years together are suddenly gathered somewhere other than a gym or an MMA event.
Ko is described as the first of his coach’s MMA students to get married.
That’s why the episode occasionally feels less like Seok Hyeon Ko’s wedding vlog and more like a Havas MMA family reunion.
These are people accustomed to seeing each other exhausted, injured, cutting weight, preparing for fights or yelling instructions from outside a cage.
Now they’re dressed up and congratulating one of their own on getting married.
Well, mostly dressed up.
They’re still MMA people.
Fight Day Might Actually Be Easier
At the end of the wedding, Ko finally gets a chance to process everything.
And what does a professional fighter compare his wedding day to?
Naturally:
A fight.
He says everything happened so quickly and felt so overwhelming that it reminded him of competing. Only after things began settling down did he finally start realizing what had just happened.
What seemed to affect him most was seeing how many people had come to celebrate with him.
He says it was difficult to even put the feeling into words.
Maybe that’s the unexpectedly nice part of the whole video.
Eleven years ago, Seok Hyeon Ko was working during the day, showing up exhausted at a CrossFit gym at night, occasionally sleeping there, and learning how to throw punches from a 29-year-old coach who wasn’t entirely sure where any of this was going.
Neither of them could have known what was coming.
The gym grew.
The coach grew.
The fighter grew.
Ko eventually made it all the way to the UFC.
And somewhere along the way, that little group of people training together became a family.
Eleven years later, they’re still together.
Only this time, nobody is waiting for the bell.
They’re waiting for Seok Hyeon Ko to stop shadowboxing and get married.
Congratulations to Seok Hyeon Ko and his bride.
And congratulations to the imaginary opponent he defeated on the way down the aisle.
That guy never had a chance.
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