Keith Lee is the younger brother of well-known UFC lightweight contender Kevin Lee. He forged his own career in the mixed martial arts world.
Keith Lee started his mixed martial arts career in 2017. In his first match, he suffered a setback when he lost to Tony Laramie.
Lee persisted in pursuing his interest, participating in leagues like Brave FC and Global Legion FC. In 2020, Keith Lee signed a contract with Bellator.
In 2021, Keith Lee competed in his most recent Bellator match against Jornel Lugo, losing by submission.
At Urijah Faber’s A1 Combat 5, Lee competed Jeremiah Labiano in a featherweight contest in his last professional contest. Keith Lee has a record of 8 victories and 5 defeats in his whole professional career.
After competing professionally for Bellator, Keith discovered a new and surprising love that has helped him rise to prominence in the world of food reviews.
After leaving Bellator, Lee made a foray into a field unrelated to professional fighting. He has achieved extraordinary success and amassed a sizable fan base on the well-known social media network TikTok.
In the MMA community, Keith Lee may not have the same amount of fame as his brother. But he excels at self-promotion.
Keith Lee has a significantly large following on TikTok. While getting well from an injury and a staph infection in November 2020, the Bellator bantamweight opened a TikTok account.
Kevin Lee is married to his longtime girlfriend, Ronni Lee. The couple has two children together. The majority of Lee’s videos include him cooking and spending time with his kid.
Lee openly discussed his reasons for pursuing a career as an influencer on social media in an interview. The termination of his Bellator contract was a turning point in his career, driving him to look for a more secure line of work.
He said: “I felt very expendable after I lost my contract with Bellator. I promised myself I’m going to build something that no one can take away from me, and that’s me being me. Completely separate from anything else I do. It’s just me and you can’t take away who I am.”
He went on to say: “I originally started doing TikTok to get more comfortable with doing interviews for MMA… Within that, it was about me learning how to slow myself down… I usually speak this slow anyways but when I get excited or I get nervous, I talk real fast.”
Lee began attracting more and more attention as a result of his dedication to his unique approach to food reviews. This typically involves him simply sitting in front of the camera and outlining where he purchased the food. He will then talk about the various dishes he will be trying along with the price he paid, and then rate each item on a scale of 1 to 10.
Even if his combat sports career may have to slow down a little bit, Lee isn’t giving up on his MMA career despite how popular his food reviews have gotten.
Lee said: “I plan to fight at least once or twice this year. I do have a lot of deals on the table and a lot of deals I just closed, so right now I’m going to focus on getting those settled. Figure out where I am in life before I promise myself to something like fighting, because I’m a true fighter at heart. I think that’s one of the main things I was put on this Earth to do.”
Lee has a massive tiktok following with over 13.5M followers on the platform. His food reviews get over 2M views daily. While tiktok CPM is a shadow of what you get on youtube, there’s a degree of power that comes with that type of reach that’s easily monetizable.