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When heavyweight Kelvin Tiller fought Jared Rosholt at PFL 4 in July, his mother and sister were in the crowd at the Nassau Coliseum on Long Island cheering him on. They had driven the 1,300 miles to New York from Topeka, Kan., to support Tiller, who was coming off an improbable knockout of Caio Alencar just a month earlier in a fight he was booked to lose. He made good again by submitting the wrestler Rosholt with a rear-naked choke in the second round.

When the fight was over, his mother and sister showered him with affections before loading into their Dodge Journey to begin the endless trek back to Kansas that same night. His sister, Autumn, who suffers from kidney failure, had skipped her dialysis to see her brother compete. His mother, Patricia Rains, has reliably driven all over the country to watch her boy engage in the laying on of hands. They are a tight-knit family, willing to go through any inconvenience if it means being there. Patricia has told Kelvin his whole life that he would amount to something — something purposeful, something great — and she wasn’t about to miss the initial blooming of her prescience.

That’s why Kelvin Tiller calls himself, “The Mama’s Boy.”

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