Sports

Meet 8-year-old football phenom already training to be next big star with help from former Dawg

He has his own custom shoes, his own logo and his own nickname.

“People been calling me Hollywood.”

Zain “Hollywood” Muhammad is all 4-foot-3, 52 pounds and just 8 years old. But he’s ready to take the football world on by storm

“I want to win a championship, national, two-time champs. I want a lot of stuff,” Zain told Channel 2 Sports Director Zach Klein.

The 8-year-old phenom has already won a lot of stuff: three flag football world championships in three different divisions. Out of 101 games played in the last year and a half, his team has won 97 times.

“They can’t really touch me,” he said.

“It started at 6 months old when he threw his bottle an incredibly long way. I said yeah, that’s my quarterback. He was finding little laces, the little tick marks on the ounces,” his dad Wali Muhammad said.

Wali said his son’s love of the game is why he wants to train nearly every day.

Through a family connection, Zain travels back and forth between Austin, Texas and Atlanta to train with former Georgia Bulldogs and Dallas Cowboys quarterback Quincy Carter.

“You like his arm, his skill set, his feet or is it too early to tell right now because he’s eight?” Klein asked Carter.

“It’s a little difficult, to honestly tell you, which one is gong to stand out, his legs or arms. I would love for him to have that Patrick Mahomes upper body with the Lamar Jackson lower body, but that’s a perfect world. But I can see the skill set and now it’s about developing those skills.`

“I get a lot of good training and I get to learn more from other trainers,” Zain said. “And that’s what I get to do in the games from what I learn from the trainers and that’s how I start building up my game.”

Zain wants his game to be part Mahomes, part Jackson and part Kyler Murray.

“I would go to Bulldogs and Texas and some other places that are so special. Where my family is from, that is where I would go to,” he said.

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