Never Stop Learning: How Hadixon King Became a Las Vegas Double Champion

The Opening Spotlight

Hadixon King's fighting career started with him pinned in the snow.

It was a winter day near Lake Tahoe, and an old friend, David Goldenberg, had come to visit. The two went back to high school in New Jersey, where they shared the wrestling room and the football field. What started as horseplay turned into a lesson. Goldenberg, roughly half King's size, took him down and held him there with no way out.

"How did you do that?" King asked. The answer was jiu-jitsu. Goldenberg is now a jiu-jitsu black belt and an undefeated MMA fighter, 4 and 0 as a pro and 9 and 0 overall. Less than a year after that day in the snow, King moved to Las Vegas to learn how to fight.

Very little about his path has been predictable. He came to America at 14 and settled in New Jersey, where he wrestled, played football through college at William Paterson University, and earned a double degree in accounting and finance. He worked in New York inside the Empire State Building, launched his own business, spent one snowy year in the mountains of Pennsylvania, then three more in California near Lake Tahoe with the woman who is now his wife.

Today he works in accounting at Mola Financial here in the valley, holds the IRS enrolled agent credential, is raising a daughter, and has become one of the most talked-about amateur fighters in Nevada. He is 38, an age when most fighters are thinking about retirement. He is just getting started.

The Craft & Vision

The Science of Two Arms and Two Legs

That day in the snow changed how King thought about fighting. He had always assumed the bigger, stronger man wins.

"When he pinned me down, I realized there are ways the body can move and ways it can't," King says. "If you put it in a position where it can't move and keep going, you get a submission. This was the first time fighting made sense to me. It wasn't about being fast or strong. It was about how the limbs and the body move."

What hooked him even more was what the process taught him about himself. He expected to learn how to control other people. He ended up learning the limits and strengths of his own body. Something as small as pulling an opponent's head off line can break their entire posture. "It's not just something you see on TV," he says. "There's actually a science to it."

That curiosity shapes his whole approach to mixed martial arts. Every fighter has the same two arms and two legs. What changes from sport to sport is the rule set, and the rules shape the art. Catch wrestling allows submissions and American wrestling doesn't. Point-based jiu-jitsu rewards holding position, while submission jiu-jitsu forces you to finish. Muay Thai allows the clinch, so fighters develop sharper knees and fight up close, while kickboxers tend to stay at range.

So he trains all of it: Muay Thai, kickboxing, boxing, judo, and jiu-jitsu in both gi and no-gi.

"Each sport has a limited rule set, and that limited rule set creates a specialized understanding," he says. "Not everything translates to MMA, but it shows you how that person moves their body. I want to pull from all of it."

"No matter who you fight, they're going to have two arms and two legs."Hadixon King

Short Notice, Big Results

King had been training jiu-jitsu for about two years when his coach called. A fighter had dropped out of a bout, and there was an open spot. The fight was in 48 hours. He said yes.

His opponent was a tattooed bodybuilder, the kind of fighter who wins the staredown before the bell. "It was intimidating," King admits. "But that fight taught me it's not about how someone looks. You can be the most intimidating-looking person, but if you're not moving your body efficiently, I can still beat you."

He won, and he kept winning.

For his second fight he moved up to heavyweight, bulking up and even putting rocks in his pockets at the weigh-in to make sure he cleared the limit. He won by knockout, finishing his opponent from the mount. His third fight, against Nosworthy, went into the third round before the referee stopped it. It remains the only loss of his career.

He answered it in San Diego. His opponent refused to touch gloves and shot for a quick takedown. King took his back and choked him out with his arm trapped, all in under a minute.

Back in Las Vegas on the Extreme Tour's Operation Knockout card, he won his first amateur title with an arm choke. Then he dropped from 205 pounds to 185 and took a second belt from JJ Cooju with a head kick knockout, landing kicks with both legs. That made him a two-division champion, ranked number one in Nevada at both light heavyweight and middleweight.

His most recent fight came together on two weeks' notice. He wanted to test his striking, but his opponent wanted no part of it.

"Most people don't want to strike with me because I'm so long and awkward," he says. "So they want to wrestle, and that's where I'm good." He finished the fight with a rear-naked choke.

Next up is a professional title at 185 pounds, and he's willing to take short-notice fights and step up in competition to get there.

"I'm 38," he says. "I'm starting my fight career when most people would be retiring from it."

"Most people don't want to strike with me because I'm so long and awkward. So they want to wrestle, and that's where I'm good."Hadixon King

The Numbers Guy

When he's not in the gym, King works full time in accounting, tax, bookkeeping, and payroll at Mola Financial in Las Vegas. He ran his own firm for years, but found that owning a business meant more time managing systems and policies than doing the work he had mastered. Today he keeps a couple of longtime clients, handles tax returns for friends and family, and does no marketing at all.

His real focus is an app he hopes to launch within the next month. On the surface, it answers tax questions in plain language, using AI while showing the source material so users can read and verify it themselves. Underneath, its mission is to train the next generation of enrolled agents, the tax professionals licensed by the IRS to represent taxpayers.

King is an enrolled agent himself, and he knows where the gap is. The exam tests what's deductible and what the caveats are. It doesn't teach you how to actually prepare a return, how the information flows through tax software onto the forms, or how to do it without getting a notice from the IRS. His app is built to prepare users for the exam, keep them current with continuing education once they pass, and bridge the gap between knowing the rules and applying them.

"Instead of serving each client myself," he says, "I can be a filter that helps people become the ones who serve clients."

Living The Good Life & Community Impact

What He'd Change About Las Vegas

Ask King what he'd change about the city and his first answer is more water. Maybe a water park. Then he gets serious.

"I love Las Vegas. It's so much fun, and it's a great fight community," he says. "But I wish there was more of a community here."

Raising a daughter in the valley, he has noticed how different childhood looks from the one he knew. Growing up, kids walked home from school, and whoever was walking in your direction became your friends. Here, the heat keeps kids indoors much of the year, and the city's transient nature makes lasting connections harder to build.

"It's not for lack of activities. There's a bunch of things my kid can go to," he says. "It just doesn't always feel like a family-oriented community. It would be cool if there was some pushback from a community standpoint to say we are family strong. We put family values first."

Where He Eats

King doesn't have one favorite restaurant. He has a favorite category. Coming from the East Coast, all-you-can-eat sushi still feels like a Las Vegas luxury, so he rotates between spots and orders half portions to try as much as he can.

"If I want to celebrate something and just enjoy good food, I'll pick a sushi spot," he says. For an everyday go-to, it's Thai House.

Faith and the Beginner's Mind

Before we wrapped, King wanted to make sure one more thing made it into this story: his faith.

"My faith in God is growing," he says. "I've been praying for wisdom and discernment more than anything else, and I feel completely blessed. I believe a lot of the opportunities I get in life, including in fighting, are directly related to my faith and how I view the world."

He calls himself a glass-half-full guy who tries to learn from every situation, and he traces that mindset back to high school. As a young football player, he carried a football everywhere, even to class, to practice protecting it from fumbles. Classmates would try to knock it loose, which only gave him more free practice. In college he gave accounting the same focus, to the point that he was solving problems on the board in his dreams.

The lesson from both was simple. Dedicate yourself fully to something, and you get results.

Most people, he says, stop learning once they settle into a job. He refuses to. It's the same mindset that made him a champion in just a few years and has him building an app on his own.

"The Bible talks about being childlike, and I think that's what childlike is," he says. "My daughter is willing to learn everything this world has to offer. Sometimes we become adults mentally and think we don't need to learn anything new. Being childlike and listening is how growth happens quickly."

"When you dedicate yourself fully to something, you get results."Hadixon King

For King, faith is part of that same pursuit. "When you bring God into the equation, you're no longer asking your brain to measure your daily routine. You're asking it to measure the entire universe," he says. "Just the pursuit of it opens your mind up."