The Arizona Boxing Commission tried to deny Matt Betzold is license to fight professionally. They defined Betzold as a downed opponent. This means that no knees to the head or high kicks from whatever foe stand across from him.
Betzold worked hard playing in unsanctioned MMA fight and winning having a 4-1 record just to prove his worth. The team had no choice but to give in to Betzold in order to prevent a threat of discrimination suit reached its doorstep.
But Betzold is no stranger to challenges. When he was still young, he got poisoned after he consumed a candy which was not a typical one. It was a package of Orange Slices candy with toxic mushroom spores which was laced by a stranger to their house.
He said "I got blood poisoning in my system. The poison and the toxins were clogging up my arteries and the poison was eating through my skin. They gave me antibiotics to reject the poison from my body, and it just started seeping through my pores. Basically I lost my leg because of a blood clot, and by the time I got out of the hospital, I had been in a coma for six weeks."
He adds "They thought I was going to die so they didn't give me the therapy that I needed, they didn't move my body. When someone is in a coma, they're supposed to move your body around everyday so your muscles don't curl up on you. Well, they didn't do that, so when I got out I couldn't even move my arms, my neck was all curled up in my chest, and I had to go through a lot of therapy to get my mobility back from my joints."
Betzold had to live his life on a wheelchair then he started to walk on crutches, then without it then started hopping around before using a prosthetics. Later on, he started iu-jitsu tournament and won first place right out of the gate.
He said "I tried fighting and the commissions wouldn't let me. It was like shaking a steak in front of a pitbull and telling him he can't have it. I just wanted it more the more they told me I couldn't."
"First they said it wasn't safe for me, so I was fighting that for the longest time, not realizing that they were breaking the law. I was trying to do it on my own, but I ended up having to get an attorney because they were flat-out discriminating against me. So once I got the attorney involved, then their story changed that I was at an advantage instead of a disadvantage, and that it was unfair for my opponent. On top of that, they were still sticking to their story that it was still unsafe for me to fight for them. So I just kept fighting them, and basically we got them on the technicality."
