“We’ll train everyone here,” Torres said. “I really like helping fighters reach their goals, because no one really did that for me.”

Torres started his fighting career in the early 1990s with karate and jiu-jitsu and now holds a second-degree black belt in karate and a first-degree black belt in judo. It wasn’t until 1996 that he stumbled upon MMA fighting, after a friend competed in the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

He decided to follow his friend’s lead and fought in his first MMA fight in 1997, an important year for Torres’s career. He competed in the Extreme Challenge Trials, an Iowa-based fight organization, that same year and emerged with a championship title. 1997 marked the start of his professional fighting career.

“These days, there are more rules when it comes to fighting — you can’t hit a guy when he’s down, can’t hit in the groin, bite or pull hair,” he said. “It wasn’t like that when I first started. Back then, we fought with no gloves, and you were allowed to kick the other guy in the head.”

Torres saw his best MMA winning streak between 2003 and 2005, when he went 9-0. He was even offered a spot on the television show, “The Ultimate Fighter,” on the channel Fox Sports 1.

But a swing thrown the wrong way at his knee during one of his training sessions brought all his opportunities to a screeching halt.

Torres said he ended up tearing his anterior cruciate ligament because of the accident.

He didn’t realize the seriousness of the injury at first and believed it was only a small tear, even training on it for four months afterward. The extra strain sent him into a year-long recovery process and threw him out of the ring.

Despite Torres’s initial frustration, he has found a new passion in MMA: creating more champions for the sport he loves.

Torres and his girlfriend opened East Lansing Underground Mixed Martial Arts together in 2011. Training for kickboxing, MMA, jiu-jitsu and Team Torres are scattered through five days a week. In the evening, East Lansing Underground Mixed Martial Arts comes to life with students spanning all ages to learn Torres’s art.

“It feels like I’m in there with them, and I don’t have to be hit,” he said. “But I get just as intense as they do. … I put a lot of emotional investment into this. It’s not even for the money.”