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Da Silva was born into a family of martial artists and knew from a young age that his life would revolve around them.
Starting with capoeira, he eventually began adding disciplines to the mix, and eventually dipped his toes into the MMA waters with an amateur debut in the summer of 2011. Two years later, he won and lost his first professional fight, and while it was prolonged there. Since then, during the times that “Snake Eyes” has remained on the sidelines, that’s not to say that he hasn’t continued to hone his craft and, perhaps more importantly, develop as a person.
“I’ve been doing martial arts since I was five years old,” began Da Silva, who had the rare opportunity to share the fight card with his father, Andre Da Silva, at BFL 25 several years ago. “I was born into a family of martial artists, so I really didn’t know anything else my whole life, growing up.
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“I always knew I was going to do this, but there’s a certain point where that’s all you’ve known your whole life, and those downtimes were times to grow as a person and mature. I was trying to fight back in my inactive days, but it’s extremely difficult to fight here in Canada when you have a decent name because your family practiced martial arts and made a name for themselves.
“People see that your track record is weak, so they don’t want to take risks,” he continued, addressing an all-too-common challenge for prospects looking to gain experience, particularly in the relatively sparse Canadian MMA. “There were many times where I had to fight and they failed, and eventually I got to the point where I gave up on the idea of forcing my MMA career.
“When I started doing that, things started getting a lot easier.”
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