Recently I was asked, "what made you want to fight?" The question referred to my twelve year professional mixed martial arts career. It started because of one person, saying one sentence, that I still remember to this day.
I was sitting in a restaurant in Thailand. There was a big table in the middle, and multiple smaller tables around it. The big table (known locally as the fighters table) welcomed many different people, many of them fighters, and it was encouraged to talk to the others on the table that you might not have previously known.
I was sitting at the end of said table, alone, eating lunch after training. There was a group of around five or six lads, in their early twenties in the middle of the table, a few seats away from mine. They were talking about how some people trained but didn't have the bottle to fight. This conversation piqued my interest, as I had only had a 'smoker' fight at that point, which I'd lost.
One of the guys from that group, a little more outspoken than the others, then started talking about how it was, "even worse when women thought they could fight". As you can imagine, this lit a fire in my belly that there was no turning back from. I spoke up, and said, "Excuse me, what did you just say?"
He said, "it's bad enough when men train and don't fight, but women shouldn't even be training, let alone fighting".
Obviously I wanted to punch him in the face, and knock him out there and then in front of his friends, the embarrassment that would end this attitude forever. But I'm better than that, so I decided to investigate further.
I asked what the basis of his argument was. He divulged that he has experienced many beginners coming into his gym at home (many of them women) and he (I imagine somewhat experienced) took great pleasure in beating them up to a point where they didn't return, in his words because they "weren't tough enough to fight".
Had I been less shocked by this attitude, I might have formulated a more reasonable response, but instead I said, "well, I am a girl, I am tough and I fight". It was only a partial truth, because I hadn't fought professionally yet, but I figured if I fought soon after that then I could remain truer to my word.
He told me I would never achieve anything as a female fighter, and I was wasting my time.
I left the table shortly after that interaction, but the conversation has stayed with me.
I went on to win my first three professional mixed martial arts fights, amassing a record of 4 wins and 3 losses, but most importantly won a place on The Ultimate Fighter season 23. Still to this day, I think about that conversation. I don't know his name, and to my knowledge I had never met him before or since. But in a way, my stubbornness and reaction to that conversation lit the match that sparked my career, so I owe him for that.
It just goes to show, you never know who's listening, or what effect your spoken word has on those around you.
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