Cody Law: Visualization was key to predicting exact time of knockout win at Bellator 276

There’s calling your shot and then there’s what Cody Law did on Saturday night.

Law needed just 77 seconds to punch out James Adcock at Bellator 276 in St. Louis, yet as impressive his performance was, the story that emerged from the finish was even more amazing. One might even say, unbelievable.

Law’s manager Ibrahim Kawa told Ariel Helwani that Law had previously written down the exact time and method of stoppage, a message that Helwani relayed on Twitter.

On The MMA Hour on Monday, Law talked about the incredible prediction and how it informs his approach to his fighting career and life in general.

“I’ve been writing stuff down for years,” Law said. “I used to write stuff down even from my amateur fights. When I first started fighting for Bellator, I would get to the hotels and they would always have a notepad sitting out with a pen, and I just started writing it down because I believe in that kind of stuff. Specifically this week, I think Tuesday night, I got to the hotel and they had the little Renaissance [Hotel] tablet out, and I thought right before bed, ‘I’ll write this down real quick.’ I like to write it down as if it would look in a stat book, if the next day I woke up and I’m reading the results of the fight and there it is. So I wrote that down and just kind of left it there.

“The day of the fight, Abe was hanging out in my room with me. He asks me, ‘What’s this?’ And I told him about it and I guess he took a picture of it right there and then. I win the fight in 1:17 and here we are.”

As for how he landed on 1:17, Law said he originally was going to write 1:15, but he felt it was too generic, so he plucked the new number off the top off his head. Though it’s been a ritual for him since he began his fighting career, this is first time Law recalls nailing the prediction on the dot.

The 26-year-old featherweight scored his third straight KO/TKO win and is now 6-0 as a pro. He credits visualization as being a big part of his success.

“I started doing this specifically at the beginning of 2020,” Law said. “I got back into the whole writing things down that you want to happen, so I started this routine every morning where I would write three things down every day in a notebook as if they already happened. I’m reading them, ‘Oh, this already happened.’ I started to notice that these things would come true for me. Like, a lot of the things I wrote down would happen.

“I wrote things down, like that I would end up getting a contract from Bellator. They don’t always happen, like I wrote that I would end 2021 6-0 and I only ended up 5-0. But these are things that I like to do and I’ve kind of been on a routine with it, and obviously I think it’s real.”

Law currently fights out of American Top Team in Florida and his teammates Johnny Eblen and Roman Faraldo also picked up wins at Bellator 276. Eblen defeated John Salter to improve to 11-0 and possibly booked himself a shot at middleweight champion Gegard Mousasi, while Faraldo needed just 44 seconds to knock out Kelvin Rayford.

ATT isn’t the first famous team that Law has been part of, as he began his collegiate wrestling career with the famed Penn State squad. However, he transferred to the University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown after his freshman year to improve his chances of winning an individual championship and went on to capture a Division II national title in 2018.

He credits his season at Penn State with introducing him to a new way of preparing for athletic competition.

“Quentin [Wright] was a beast, a national champ at Penn State,” Law said. “He was right, at Penn State [head coach] Cael [Sanderson] and the coaching staff did teach us a lot of that kind of stuff. We would draw pictures of ourselves on the podium, we would do these kinds of exercises that you wouldn’t really think you’d hear a college wrestling team do. But we would, we’d take pictures of ourselves on a fake podium, we’d write goals down — that’s kind of where I really learned about visualization.”

Law hopes to compete again in June and continue his impressive start with Bellator, the only organization he’s competed for since turning pro.

As for those doubting his predictive powers, Law is in disbelief that anyone thinks his team would go out of their way to perpetuate a hoax.

“It was one of those things where I seen people being like, ‘This is so fake,’” Law said. “I was like, why would I ever go to the lengths of doctoring [this]? How would you even doctor a photo to make the time stamp different?”

“When did Abe send you the photo of that?” he continued. “Right after I fought, right? What did people think, Abe was sitting in the crowd with a Renaissance notebook waiting to write this down at whatever time I finished? It’s crazy.”