[So much of this piece (two years old?) is already out of date--which is such good news for WMMA.]
“...girls
do not think of boxing, wrestling, or karate as suitable for them, and properly
so…”
- Self-Defense for Girls and Women: A Physical
Education Guide, 1975
I
saw mixed martial arts live for the first time this January. Screaming in my
ear, six dollar Bud Lights at the bar, blood ten feet distant: live. Rumble at
the Roseland, produced by Portland, Oregon’s Full Contact Fight Federation, was
celebrating its tenth anniversary, and the line outside the venue extended the
length of the block. The card’s headliner was a girl fight—the only one of the
night—between amateurs Liz “Lightning” McCarthy and Liz “The Titan” Tracy.
At
the bell, Tracy came at McCarthy, who managed immediately to stick a right jab.
Then Tracy tried to get McCarthy on the ground, but when McCarthy didn’t budge,
someone— Tracy’s coach?—yelled, “Come on! Knees!” leading Tracy to knee her
opponent twice in the abdomen. The crowd went bananas, chanting for “Tracy!
Tracy!” who was harnessing her size to push McCarthy against cage. McCarthy
took a moment to regain some control, and then, holding onto Tracy’s flanks and
bracing her own back against the cage, she swung her legs up quickly, inverting
her body and locking her knees around Tracy’s left shoulder. McCarthy then went
for an arm bar—straightening Tracy’s arm at the elbow—and that’s when she felt
the snap.
A
guy in the crowd started barking like a dog.
“I
felt it,” said McCarthy afterward. “That was a freaky moment, because I hit the
arm bar and it was so tight, and I thought, All
right, this is it. I just won this fight. And then I felt her arm break and
she slammed me down. And so it was kind of like, oh shit. Because I made the mistake of thinking I’ve got this before the ref was there
breaking it up.”
Stunned
by a surge of adrenaline, overcome with the desire to prove herself, Tracy
responded to the break with brute force, dropping her knees to try and buck
McCarthy loose, powering McCarthy’s head into the floor. When the final horn
sounded, I wasn’t sure who’d won. Tracy looked confident, beaming until seconds
before the decision was revealed—and then, somehow, she knew. She brought a
hand to her face and began to cry.
“From
the blue corner!” the announcer shouted into his microphone. “Liz! Lighting!
McCaaarrrthyyy!”
I
hadn’t seen the break happen; or, rather, I’d seen it without knowing. Tracy
was the fight’s early aggressor, and to my eyes, she’d been making quick work
of McCarthy’s tiny frame. `
After
the fight, news of Tracy’s broken arm spread fast among the folks milling
around backstage. Breaks of this sort are unusual but not unheard of in mixed
martial arts, but what really amazed everyone was that Tracy’s arm had broken
in the first round—yet she went on to finish the fight, going all three rounds
at three minutes each. Was she crazy to keep going? After all, as an amateur
she wasn’t being paid to win, or even to participate. At stake was not money,
then, but the FCFF women’s straw weight title and a championship belt to prove
it. At stake, too, were rewards that are harder to touch—like honor, and
recognition.
If
you think about mixed martial arts at all, chances are you conjure an enclosed
cage with two hulking men locked inside. Probably they are tattooed, and beating
each other into bloody pulps. Or maybe you picture female fighters. Maybe
you’re familiar with Gina Carano, whose transition from a successful MMA career
with Strikeforce promotions to a fledgling career in Hollywood made has entertainment
headlines of late. Maybe you’ve seen her in the Steven Soderbergh film, Haywire.
Carano’s
last fight, in August 2009, was a doozy: it pitted her against MMA superstar
Cristiane “Cyborg” Santos, and marked the first time that female mixed martial
arts fighters headlined a professional event. The fight aired on Showtime, and
according to Strikeforce CEO Scott Coker, it was the
second-highest-rated show in the channel’s history, averaging 576,000
viewers and peaking at 856,000 during the main event. Carano, “the prettiest
face in MMA,” walked away bloodied, bruised, and $125,000 richer. Santos, who defeated
Carano by knockout to become the new featherweight champion, took home a pittance
by comparison—a $25,000 purse, including a $5,000 win bonus.
Enter,
in early 2011, “Rowdy” Ronda Rousey, an Olympic Bronze medalist in Judo with a
professional MMA record of 4-0. When she got into the sport, she cited Carano
as an inspiration, and opinions differ on whether Rousey earned or talked her
way into a title bout against Strikeforce bantamweight champion Miesha
“Takedown” Tate. For her part, Rousey said she was trying to change the game—or
at any rate, the face of the game—more doggedly pursuing the “pretty face of
MMA” role that Gina Carano somewhat reluctantly found herself in as a star on Strikeforce’s
featherweight roster.
Veteran
fighter Sarah Kaufman, who became the first Strikeforce women’s bantamweight champion
in February 2010, had a professional record of 14-1 and was the presumed next
in line for the title shot. She’d successfully defended her title against
Roxanne Modaferri in July 2010, losing it to Marloes Coenen that October;
Coenen was then bested by Tate—and because the women’s bantamweight division is
small, it was widely believed that Kaufman would get the first go at Tate’s
belt. It therefore came as something of a shock to the MMA community when Scott
Coker announced that Tate vs. Rousey would headline the March 3rd
Strikeforce card.
In
response to criticism of this decision, both Coker and Rousey pointed to her
Olympic medal as justification for the title shot. But Tate and others felt Rousey
hadn’t done enough to earn it, hadn’t worked her way through the ranks like Kaufman
had. It wasn’t her turn yet, they said, and furthermore, at 145 lbs., all her
experience had been in the featherweight division. It didn’t help to smooth
matters when Rousey adopted a provocative public persona, playing up the
marketability of two pretty girls fighting and trash-talking her detractors,
including Tate.
Back
in November 2011, when the Tate-Rousey matchup was still just speculation, a
popular online show called MMA Hour
hosted a call-in round table discussion with Tate and Rousey. Both acknowledged
that their looks would help sell the fight, but disagreed—among other things—about
whether that marketing strategy was right. Sarah Kaufman called in, indignant
over the idea that women’s athleticism wasn’t enough of a selling point, and angry
that she might be denied the next title shot.
“I
think that the fight between Miesha and I is an exciting fight, and I think
that it could be marketed in a very exciting way,” Kaufman said. “And you know,
Miesha is kind of like that prettier girl, and I’m definitely more on the
serious, sporty side. And I’m ready to smash Miesha’s face.”
Kaufman
worried that if someone like Rousey could use looks or charisma to leapfrog
more seasoned athletes, the rest of the division stood to suffer. She
said that for the sake of women’s longevity in the sport, a fight like Tate-Rousey
should be built up over a longer period of time, “have the fans get into it,”
she said. “And if [Rousey] runs through people, which I don’t
think she will, then I’ll be happy to beat her face in. She wants to be pretty?
She won’t be as pretty after our fight.”
Newly
captivated by MMA after seeing the McCarthy-Tracy fight at the Roseland, I signed
up for a grappling clinic led by Miesha Tate and her boyfriend and trainer Bryan
Caraway. Bryan fights for the sport’s top promotion, the Ultimate Fighting
Championship, and at the time, Miesha was still the Strikeforce bantamweight champion,
with an impressive professional record of 12-2.
I’d
brought a friend along to partner with, and we were very much out of our
league. The other attendees, all men, had at least a rudimentary idea of what
was going on, and some had amateur fight experience. One guy had a black eye.
Coordination has never been my strong suit, and I was intimidated—but our
instructors spoke in encouraging platitudes.
“Everybody
has to start somewhere,” Miesha said, smiling.
“It’s okay—just keep trying that first hold. You’ll
get it!” Bryan assured us, as I rammed a knee into my friend’s crotch.
“Oops!
Sorry,” I said, adjusting my leg. At one point, while Bryan talked us through
the initial hold, I was lying on top of my friend, cradling her head. “It looks
like I’m trying to romance her,” I quipped. The position did not feel tough.
He
smiled charitably at my joke, and then his face went dead serious. “I guarantee
you won’t think there’s anything romantic about it when she’s kicking your ass,”
he said.
A
month later, I drove up to Washington to spend some more
time with Miesha and Bryan as they prepared for the Rousey fight. We met at Yakima
Mixed Martial Arts, bare-bones gym in a dual-storefront strip mall, the air
oppressive despite ceiling fans spinning at full blast.
“I
was kind of oblivious to it at the time, but I think at first they really didn’t
want us there,” Miesha said of her days wrestling in high school. “They tried
to make us quit. They were like, these
girls are not here to be serious. I mean, what girl wants to wrestle? It’s not
a woman’s sport, you know? They always put us in with the best wrestlers, and wouldn’t
give us any advice. It was just like, go.
Wrestle. You wanna be here, you wanna wrestle, get in there. And we would
just get smashed. I had no clue what I was doing and the guys were grinding my
face into the mat—just being little buttheads, you know?”
Bryan
and Miesha met as students at Central Washington University. He was a little
older, an experienced wrestler and fighter who’d started an MMA club on campus.
The school had no wrestling program, so with some hesitation, Miesha decided to
join the MMA club. Bryan wound up coaching and cornering her first amateur
fight, and eventually they started dating. For a few years, they lived with
Bryan’s best friend in a 22-foot mobile home parked outside the gym, so they
could quit their day jobs and dedicate all of their time to training and
fighting. By virtue of their shared profession, Miesha and Bryan spend most of
their time together. They live together, train together, and travel together.
They have a tendency to finish each other’s sentences.
“For
the women there’s a lot more than just fighting ability that we have to have, in
terms of what the promotion wants… like the feminine side,” said Miesha.
“…because
women’s MMA,” interjected Bryan, “I hate to say it, but it’s still like a
novelty. It’s not taken as seriously, it’s not considered a sport as much as
men’s.”
Miesha
pulled her hair into a high ponytail. “We’re still working.”
Brian
agreed. “Yeah. It’s taken like a sex symbol—like sexy wrestling.”
“Unfortunately.”
“But
it’s still legit. I mean, they’re fighting. Trying to kill each other. It’s
coming around, but…”
“...it’s
not as much of a priority as men’s fights,” said Miesha.
She
got up and started jogging in place. Bryan laced up his wrestling shoes. “Girls
are not as big of perverts publicly as men,” he said with a chuckle, stepping
onto the mat.
Miesha rolled her eyes and corrected him. “We’re
just more reserved about it.”
Bryan
started doing leg sweeps across the mat, running his body gently into a
punching bag. “You’re gonna talk your way out of training,” he warned. Miesha
did some jumping jacks and then joined him on the mat.
They
trained for two hours without pause. The pair talked quietly and in sometimes-unfamiliar
language, half-sentences, jargon all their own: I heard something about a
pirouette step, about the wizard,
about windshield wiper-ing. Mostly
they were reviewing and perfecting transitions—“flow wrestling,” Bryan told me
later. For a minute, Miesha got hung up on a new move. Bryan stood wide-legged,
and she held fast to his calves, attempting to take him down.
“Hold
on,” he said, retracting a leg and wiping sweat from his brow.
Miesha
blew her nose lightly into her shirt collar. She was frustrated. “I can’t
fuckin’—”
“Yeah,
you can,” Bryan said. “I’m trying to tell you something. I’m trying to show you
a move. You gotta wait until I show you. You’re not listening.”
Crouched, she rested her chin in her hand. “So
basically I need more momentum.”
“Yeah.
So now what are you going to do?” he asked.
“I’m gonna jump
on your back,” she said, jumping on his back and taking him down in a
mock
attack.
Bryan
made funny fight sounds, and pretended he was kicking her in the face; both
laughed and then resumed the original position. Miesha did a mental inventory,
muttered the steps aloud, and started over. She dropped her left knee and
kicked her right leg out behind her. She did it again. She still wasn’t quite
getting it.
She
said to me, by way of explanation, “I’m learning, so I’m thinking too much.”
Without
hesitation, Bryan said, “Don’t think. Just do.
Do something! Something is better
than just breathing. You already turned the corner. You’re just not… It’s hard.
There you go. Right when you drop your knee, then you sweep. BAM! Step and
sweep. That’s better!”
Unprompted,
every fighter I’ve talked to likens mixed martial arts to a physical game of
chess, and the more training I watched, the more I appreciated the analogy. The
sport requires concentration, strategy, knowing one’s options. With submission
practice in particular, I also envisioned things like origami—seeing grapplers’
bodies as pieces of colorful paper, their transitions mimicking intricate
patterns of folding and unfolding. I saw them as wooden rings in a
disentanglement puzzle, patiently trying every angle, every maneuver until they
succeeded.
Miesha
and Bryan repositioned themselves into a standing tangle.
“Now
punch towards my truck,” Bryan said, and Miesha did it: she punched toward the
black Chevy Silverado parked out front, knocking her boyfriend off balance and
throwing him to the floor with a spectacular thud.
“The
stage we’re at right now,” Miesha had said that morning, “we’re fighting for
more than just winning a single fight. We’re fighting for equal acceptance, and
to be taken seriously as athletes.”
Glimpsing
her training camp, it’s no wonder she and other female fighters get frustrated
when they’re not treated by the fans or the promoters with the same level of
respect as their male counterparts. Online—the domain of most MMA news and
chatter—comments like the following flourish: “thegaps in her game...i will
fill with my penis” [sic]; “all girl fighters mighthave girlfriend prolly she
dont want boyfriend pregnant just wonder” [sic, sic, sic]; and perhaps more to
the point: “Something just feels so wrong watching2 women dishing it out
inside a cage...”
Glena
Avila is a blonde, blue-eyed, curvy and compact; a women’s kickboxing and
submission instructor, she’s also very tough. A 36-year-old title-holding mixed
martial artist with three years of fighting under her belt, Glena began
training at an age when most women, and many men, are beginning to think about
retiring from the cage.
At
eighteen, Glena was a single mother of a baby boy, so a few years later when
she met her now ex-husband—a
military man, she says, and well put together—she thought he’d
provide her with the stability and support she craved.
Together they had a daughter, Annie, but Glena says she was deeply unhappy in
her marriage.
“I
felt kept in a cage and controlled. I had a very controlling husband,” she told
me. “It was suffocating.”
Glena had been a fan of MMA since the early
nineties, and after she and her husband separated, she saw a
women’s bout online and decided that she wanted to try it out. She got in touch
with the promoters (Full Contact Fight Federation) and asked if she could be
set up with a fight. With no experience to speak of, Glena trained for just six
weeks before her first bout—which she says in retrospect was not very smart—but
she won, and she remains undefeated. In MMA, Glena found a cage she was happy
to step into—one she could walk out of on her own terms and with her head held
high.
She
likens life as a fighter to being in college: schedules can be messy, and
there’s not much free time or money, but the potential rewards for working hard
are plenty. For one thing, Glena fights on professional cards now, which means
she can earn a couple thousand dollars for winning a fight. But more than that,
she said, “I’m able to show Annie so many things that parents forget about,
like perseverance, working hard to obtain your goals, dealing with people
talking negatively about you, and how you handle that. And at some point, I’m
going to have to talk to her about losing. And how to lose well.”
She
told me about a fight she was offered once against a really pretty girl, about
how the promoter was pushing to make it happen, how he anticipated swift ticket
sales. He was planning to market it as a “battle of the big-boob blondes.”
Though she was confident she could beat the opponent he’d proposed, Glena said
no.
“Do
I want to just be labeled like that, for a paycheck?” she mused. “I don’t know.
I’m a mom. I have a little girl. My son is a young man. I don’t want to portray
that image. It doesn’t hurt my feelings at all if someone wants to call me a
hot fighter, but make no mistake: I came to fight. This is a mixed martial arts
competition, not a bikini contest.”
I
asked Glena what it’s like getting in the cage, duking it out in front of all
those people. “There’s a big crowd,” she told me, her eyes firing, “and they’re
all bloodthirsty and screaming and yelling, and you’re in a cage locked in. If
you could ever have a gladiator moment in your life, that’s what it feels
like.”
It’s
a fitting analogy. At the root of mixed martial arts lies pankration (“all
powers”), an ancient Greek sport that was among the most popular Olympic events
after its inclusion in 33rd ancient Olympic Games. Practitioners fought naked, using a combination of wrestling and striking
techniques; and with no established rounds or time limits, bouts ended only in submission,
knock-out, or death. Alexander the Great was a practitioner and trained his
armies in pankration; it’s been surmised that their hungry eastward march
toward world domination helped spread the practice to Southern Asia, and in
that case pankration may have played a part in the development of certain
Eastern martial arts. In any case, the Romans—whose tastes favored cruelty of
the armed variety—incorporated pankration into their gladiatorial training,
thinking it wise for a gladiator to have some recourse should he be disarmed
during battle.
There exist numerous literary references to female
gladiators (and to laws banning them), too: they fought little people, animals,
and each other, apparently topless, in undoubtedly brutal and entertaining
fashion, and stood as symbols of the relative wealth, extravagance, or depravity
of a given emperor or private host.
Mixed
martial arts has more contemporary roots in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, which, with
its emphasis on leverage and momentum over size or brute
force, is a combat style well-suited to women. Today, however, the sport is almost
unanimously linked to Dana White, the outspoken UFC president who has
continually insisted that women will never fight in his organization. As a
result, professional female fighters have been relegated to fighting for Strikeforce
and lesser-known promotions like Bellator, neither of which has the cultural
cache or payout power of the UFC.
In
March 2007, UFC parent company Zuffa bought out rivals Pride Fighting
Championships and World Extreme Cagefighting (WEC) and folded both into the
UFC, solidifying its place at the top of the MMA promotions heap. The plot
thickened for women in March of 2011, when Zuffa purchased Strikeforce, the top
independent promoter of women’s fights. Zuffa has said it plans to honor the
contracts of all fighters currently on the Strikeforce roster, but the question
on everyone’s mind, especially the women, is what will happen when the
contracts run out? Will Strikeforce be allowed to carry on as always, or will
it be folded into the UFC boys’ club, like Pride and WEC before it? And if the
latter, what will female fighters do? How will they preserve their place in the
fight game?
White’s
latest argument against females—that the talent pool is not deep enough to
warrant a new class of fighters—is short-sighted but not entirely unreasonable:
Strikeforce has only eight women in its bantamweight division and six
featherweights, including the currently-suspended Cris “Cyborg” Santos.
Bellator, by contrast, has only one female division, with eight fighters in
total.
On
March 1st, two days before the Tate-Rousey fight, Strikeforce held a
press conference featuring all fighters from the main card. In the lead-up to
the fight, there’d been a lot of trash talking between the two women—Ronda
claimed to be shaking things up to sell the fight, and Miesha quite frankly
didn’t care for Ronda’s big mouth. Unsurprisingly, the media was still
interested in hearing them sound off on each other, on what sells a fight, and
on how the female athletes of this still-evolving sport wish to—even ought to—present themselves.
“I
don’t care why people are watching my fights,” said Ronda. “I look at the
YouTube comments. Some people watch the fights because it’s the only time they
get to see women’s bare feet.” There was considerable laughter from the
gathered journalists.
“I
do care, personally,” Miesha
answered. “My goal is to have us be respected more as athletes and fighters
than [for] our looks, and I think that comes first and foremost.”
Before the title bout against Miesha, Ronda’s
longest fight had lasted a mere 49 seconds, and each of her four wins had come
by the same vicious arm bar submission. Detractors called the Judoka a one
trick pony, but in a way, that trick put her at a real advantage: Miesha’s camp
had very little footage of the newcomer to study.
On fight night, the bell rang and Miesha came out
swinging, landing the first several punches. But she pushed her punches, didn’t
snap back as quickly as she should have. This gave Ronda the power of Miesha’s
weight and she took Miesha down pretty fast, started punching her in the head.
“Hammer fist to champion’s head!” roared the
announcer.
Ronda started looking to take side mount and nearly
secured her signature arm bar less than a minute in, but Miesha recovered—something
none of Rousey’s competitors had ever managed to do. From standing, Miesha took
Ronda’s back; she was trying for a rear naked choke but never got full control
of Rousey’s free arm.
“Rousey! Wearing Tate like a backpack!” the
announcer hollered.
It was an exciting fight: tons of complex ground
work, an angry standing clinch, some good kicks and punches from both sides. With
just over a minute-and-a-half to go, Ronda threw Miesha down on her back and
took full mount, sitting on Miesha’s chest and hurling fists. It looked like
the fight might end by knockout right then and there, all the personal
animosity coming out through Ronda’s fists while Miesha struggled to break
free.
With fifty seconds remaining, Ronda made a move. On
her back now, she had Miesha’s left shoulder squeezed tight between her thighs,
the arm extended along her torso, a second attempt at the arm bar. She held
fast to the writhing Miesha and pulled back on Miesha’s arm. What followed was
one of the most gruesome arm bars ever caught on tape: Miesha’s arm bent in
altogether the wrong direction at the elbow, her face contorted in pain. But she
held and struggled, determined not to submit.
And then, four minutes and twenty-seven seconds
into the first round, Miesha tapped. Her heart sank. Ronda extracted herself
and the ref came over to hold Miesha’s mangled arm in place on the floor of the
cage. Breathing hard, Ronda paced the ring, looking down occasionally upon the
now-former champ. Sarah Kaufman—who’d won her undercard fight that night
against Alexis Davis—smiled on the sidelines, sure she’d be next and ready to
reclaim her title.
“She calls herself ‘Rowdy,’” said the announcer,
“but there’s no doubt about it, she is the Arm Bar Assassin!” It was difficult
to disagree, but Miesha, now flanked by medical staff, had blown everyone away
with her borderline-reckless hesitation to tap.
“What a heart,” the announcer crooned. What a heart, I silently agreed. Still
in the cage, a reporter asked Miesha how she felt. As they will, rumors were
flying that her arm had been broken.
“It’s a little sore,” said Miesha. “But you know
what? I came here to put on a fight. I really didn’t like her, so I wanted to
come out here and come out hard. I got a little overzealous; she caught the arm.
I gotta give her respect. I respect her as an athlete.”
The
fight, aired on Showtime, averaged 431,000 viewers, peaking at 506,000 during
the main card between Rousey and Tate. It drew markedly more viewers than the
prior Strikeforce event on Showtime, an all-male card in January.
Not
long afterward, Zuffa CEO Lorenzo Fertitta said that he was “blown away by the
fight, blown away by [Tate and Rousey’s] athleticism and the way they promoted
the fight, the whole thing.” He said maybe it was time to consider starting up
a new women’s division. And even reliable old Dana White appears to be budging
some, whether because the women’s athleticism won him over, or because he’s preparing
to cede his stance. For now, no matter: in the aftermath of the fight, White
said something very strange for a man who not long ago dismissed the question
of female fighters with a wave, with a cocksure “No. Never.” White looked
straight into a reporter’s camera and said that Miesha “was
put on this earth to fucking fight.”
Strikeforce
recently disclosed the payouts from the Tate-Rousey card. In the penultimate
matchup, winner Josh Thomson earned $80,000; his opponent took home a $38,000
purse. Miesha, former champion and one half of the headlining card, took home $19,000.
And Ronda Rousey—the Olympic medalist, the Judoka, new “pretty face of MMA” and
now Strikeforce women’s bantamweight champion—earned $32,000, including the win
bonus—less than half of Thompson’s pay.
So:
Were these women put on this earth to fight? And if so, could it finally be
time for them to get their due? I know a few women who’d answer without
hesitation, yes, we were, and yes, it is.
