When Charles Rosa first rode his bike past American Top Team’s gym in Boca Raton, Fla., he thought it was a boxing gym.

Another way of putting it was, he hoped it was a boxing gym. That’s the whole reason he went in there, since he knew nothing about ATT, or even about mixed martial arts. He didn’t even think that martial arts stuff really worked, he can admit now.

“I just thought it was who was tougher,” Rosa told MMAjunkie.

Maybe that’s why, after attending his first kickboxing class taught by UFC featherweight Cole Miller, Rosa didn’t think twice about tugging on Miller’s cape and asking the UFC standout to be his very first sparring partner.

“I asked him if he would spar with me because I didn’t have a partner, and he kind of just looked at me and gave me like an ignoring me look,” Rosa said. “I was almost a little bit insulted. I didn’t know much about mixed martial arts. I didn’t know he was a UFC fighter. But when somebody looks at me like that, you know, I asked him again.”

Miller relented, and for the next five rounds the completely inexperienced Rosa found himself going blow-for-blow with a UFC fighter. Did he win those rounds? Well, no. But neither did he get himself murdered, which should have been encouraging.

The problem was, Rosa had never really watched the UFC, so he didn’t know who Miller was. To him, he’d just been beaten up by some “skinny kid,” which he took as a sign that he wasn’t very good at this kickboxing stuff. It wasn’t until former UFC middleweight Charles McCarthy filled him in on what had just happened that he started to appreciate the reality of the situation.

“From that second on, not taking anything away from Cole, I knew that if he could do it I could do it,” Rosa said.

For Rosa, this was one of those intersections in life, a place where one turn takes you on a completely different path than the one you were on. He’d faced a similar one as a teenager growing up in Boston. When his two older brothers, Dominick and Vincent, both died of drug overdoses, Rosa felt lost. He attended college, he said, “but I struggled mentally.”

Finally he decided to move to South Florida for a fresh start. He rode his bike everywhere. He kept his eyes peeled for a boxing gym. ATT Boca Raton, then owned and operated by McCarthy, who has since made a career managing fighters rather than training them, just happened to be the first gym he came across.

Not some strip mall karate studio. Not some taekwondo joint. Instead it was an ATT satellite school, which is where he first learned to fight before eventually moving to the main gym in Coconut Creek, where he found himself surrounded by so many top fighters that “eventually I had no other option but to get better,” he said.

He would go on to spend the next six years of his life training to be an MMA fighter. After 20 amateur fights, he finally turned pro. Now he’s 9-0 as a pro, and move to the UFC’s featherweight division seems imminent. But what if he’d never moved to Florida? What if he hadn’t biked past ATT that day, and decided to go inside and get beaten up by Miller?

“Every single day I think of that,” Rosa said. “I still ride my bike and I go past taekwondo gyms and karate gyms and I wonder, man, maybe if I’d rode past that I’d be doing that. Who knows?”