My Fight / Your Fight (38 page)

We lie on my bed and my mom tells me all the reasons why I'm going to destroy the other girl in less than twenty-four hours. It is a ritual we have had since I was a little kid. She lists every reason why I'm the best in the world like it's a bedtime story.

Friday night, I try to stay up as late as possible. Closing my eyes in bed, I know I have prepared and that I am at my best. I reflect on all my hard work that led up to this moment, not only in camp, but in the days, weeks, months, years, decades that preceded it. I open my eyes one last time, and staring into the darkness, I know that even if I'm at my worst, no one will beat me.

When I fall asleep, I sleep well.

Sometimes you get overwhelmed and you take steps back, often without even realizing it. We were striking in the gym when my coach Edmond stopped practice.

“When you were doing judo, if you put your mind to it, could anyone make you take a step backwards in your whole life?” he asked me.

“No, of course not.”

“If you put your mind to it in judo, would anyone be able to make you take a step back even once?” Edmond pressed.

“No.”

“So why am I able to make you take a step back when striking? You shouldn't take a single step backwards in your entire fucking career.”

Edmond was right, of course. I had been allowing myself to be pushed back toward the ropes in the gym without even noticing it. A fighter never wants to get backed up against the cage. Once he'd pointed out my weakness, I corrected it. No one has a right to make me step backward. Even if that person is physically stronger than I am, I should be smart enough not to take that step back.

I haven't stepped back since that day.

A minute into my fight at UFC 170 on February 22, 2014, I grabbed Sara McMann by the arm, thrusting my knee into her side and nailing her right in the liver. She buckled, defenseless, and I knew that the fight was over. The referee jumped in between us, calling it a TKO. It was my first MMA win that did not come by armbar. I caught Edmond's eye in my corner, and I could tell it was the happiest with me he had ever been.

Coming out of that fight, I was feeling pretty happy too. I had given this girl an impressive beat-down, and my love life was looking up.

I had always had a strict policy against dating fighters. I'm a big believer in keeping your business and personal lives separate. Plus, being around fighters all day in the gym, I hear the way they talk about girls.

I started hanging out with “Norm” before I had even been signed to the UFC. In the beginning, we were just friends. The main reason that I even hung out with him had more to do with physical proximity than physical chemistry; he lived in my neighborhood.

“You want to hang out?” he asked.

“Listen, the only time I've got to hang out is, if you can stop by my house at six a.m. and take me skimboarding, then we can hang out.”

He would wake up before the sun came up, just to have the chance to hang out with me. He was the exact opposite of Dog Park Cute Guy in that regard, and considering DPCG had stolen my car to go on a drug bender, the difference between the two guys seemed like a good sign.

Norm made me laugh. He called me “Wonder Woman.” Then one day, we were at the beach skimboarding, and he started making these really goofy jokes. He pretended to make these not-so-stealth stealth moves, and I busted up laughing and that was the start of that.

That time in my life marked the start of a lot of things. I got my shot in the UFC. I moved to my new house. I filmed my first movie. Being with Norm was a casual, easy thing in my very chaotic life.

Norm had no family in L.A., so I brought him home for Easter.

“What did you think?” I asked my family afterward.

“He seemed like a douche,” Jennifer said.

“I don't know,” my mom said. “He seemed OK. A little too impressed with himself.”

“OK?” I asked. My mom was hard to read. “Like douchey OK or nice OK?”

My mom pursed her lips and thought.

“Well, the problem is you set the bar with your first boyfriend,” my mom said. “Honestly, after Dick, you could bring home a gorilla and we would be like, ‘Oh, hello, fine sir. So nice to meet you. Can I offer you a banana?' ”

It was not a ringing endorsement for Norm.

When I got back from Bulgaria and was training for my fight against Tate, Norm told me I was fortunate, that it was “much easier to succeed in the women's division” than it was in the men's. Then, right before my fight with Tate, he told me things weren't working out.

“I don't want to have to answer to anyone,” he said.

But after I won, he said he had made a huge mistake and asked me to take him back.

A few weeks before my fight with McMann, he said, “I'm just not ready for commitment.” Three weeks later, just days before my fight, he showed up at my door on Valentine's Day, apologizing and offering to whisk me off on an exotic vacation. I was reluctant to go another round. But we headed to the rainforest the week after my win.

We had just gotten back from our trip and I was standing in his kitchen when he pulled out the little box. Inside was a white gold necklace with a diamond pendant. “Wonder Woman” was inscribed on the back. I was ecstatic to see him make such an effort.

“I want to date you for real this time,” he said.

I wanted that too.

“Don't lose this,” he said, referring to the necklace. “I spent a lot of money on it.”

He wanted to be with me, he said. But he also wanted me to be things I wasn't. He wanted me to do the dishes. He wanted me to do his laundry. He wanted me to clean up shit in the morning. He wanted me to pretty up more and dress up more, and do my nails and my makeup and things like that. He just wanted me to be this chick I wasn't. He always made me feel like I was too messy, that I was not domestic enough, that I wasn't girly enough.

The truth is, some days, I get made up into this red-carpet-walking cover model. A team of makeup, hair, and stylist people go to work on me like a NASCAR pit crew. After they're done, I look in the mirror and think,
Damn, I look good.

But most days, I get in my car after a two-workout day after my coaches and training partners jab, drill, and wrestle me until my body aches. I walk out bruised and sore in loose clothes. I am still sweating, even after taking a shower, because I worked out so hard. Afterward, I sit in the car and think,
Damn, I look like a yeti.
That's more who I really am.

With a couple of movie roles in the works and a couple of UFC championship fights under my belt, I thought,
Maybe I have too many people telling me how awesome I am all the time.
Maybe Norm served as a kind of ego checks-and-balances system. But he never called me beautiful. He was never complimentary.

“That was a great investment,” he said one night about a chick in my division who allegedly got a boob job.

I tried to conceal my disappointment. He never complimented me on my body. To have him ogling another girl's chest hit both at my heart and my pride. It was an all-too-familiar feeling.
That was a Dick thing to say
, I thought to myself, thinking of IttyBitty.

But I was trying to justify staying with someone who was making me feel bad about myself. He became cold. He never kissed me out of nowhere. He never once brushed my hair behind my ear. He never wanted to hang out with my friends.

Then one day, I accidentally left my necklace in the bathroom at a gym. I went back after I'd trained, and someone had scooped it out of there. I didn't want to say anything about it. My heart ached over losing it. The idea of having to tell him his gift was gone made my stomach hurt.

One day, he mentioned that he hadn't seen me wearing it. I burst into tears.

“Listen, I lost it,” I said. “I don't know how, but I've been looking for it.”

“Well, I'm never going to make the mistake of buying you something expensive again,” he said.

I thought of my dad. When my parents had gotten engaged, my dad gave Mom a ring. She lost it. Upset, she broke the news to my dad. And he was happy.

“That's OK,” he said. “You deserve a better ring anyway.”

He bought her a nicer ring.

I knew Norm would never be anything like my dad.

I had already gone through an entire relationship where someone tried to break me down and change me, and here I was letting someone else treat me the same way. I wanted to break up with him in that moment, but we both had fights coming up. You never mess with a fighter ahead of a fight. Well, I never do.

He returned from his fight, which he lost, and two weeks before my fight with Alexis Davis, Norm broke up with me for the final time. It was right in the middle of two-week-itis, when I'm at my most emotional.

My dad wasn't a fighter, but he had learned this when he proposed to my mom when she was training for the world championships. He flew out to New York and asked her to marry him.

“I'll get back to you,” my mom said. “Right now, I'm busy.”

And, at that moment, as I was preparing for Alexis Davis, I was busy. Something inside me snapped. Norm had no respect for me, but I needed some self-respect.

“You know what? This is the third fight in a row, where you fucked with me right before the fight,” I said. “Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me three times, I'm a fucking idiot. Do I look like a fucking idiot to you? I'm never coming back again.”

I wasn't even sad over the breakup. I had come to the realization that “Norm” was merely average when it came to everything: average looks, average intelligence, average fighter. There's nothing really exceptional about him, except for the fact that he was an exceptionally shitty boyfriend.

I didn't cry. Every other time that we had trouble and every other time he fucked with me before the other fights, every other time that we broke up, I cried. Now, not a single tear came out of my eyes.

I was pissed that I had let myself make so many of the same mistakes I had made years before. But I was never going to let someone make me feel that way ever again.

Like clockwork, he soon started sending me texts saying, “I made a mistake.” Reflecting on our relationship, all I could think was,
Yeah, so did I.
We never spoke again.

I wasn't going to sit around and feel bad about myself because of this asshole. I had a fight coming up. Every single time that he fucked with me before a fight, the other girl got it.

I thought to myself as I walked to my car,
If that is any foretelling of how this fight's going to go, this chick's getting fucking murdered.

My showdown with Alexis Davis was two weeks away, and I was very much looking forward to that fight.

People always ask, “What if someone has the answer to your armbar?”

I always tell them that no matter what my opponent tries to do, I will have a response. Then there is a response to my response, and there's a response to that response. I memorize all the possible responses, so I go down the chain a lot quicker than the other person can.

Some of my critics say that I just do the same move over and over again. They don't realize that every single person that I fought studied all of my armbars, and they tried a different kind of correct reaction every time, but there is no right answer.

Depending on what my opponent does, there is a different reaction for everything. Every armbar I've done is entirely different to me. Just because it ends up looking the same doesn't mean that I got there the same way.

There are over 100,000 ways to get the same result.

After the McMann fight, I was cast in the
Entourage
movie. Filming was a blast, but made me miss fighting. I knew my knee needed some maintenance surgery, but wanted to fight one more time before spending months recovering.

I fought Alexis Davis in UFC 175 over Fourth of July weekend of 2014 in Las Vegas. It was my tenth professional fight. There was talk about her being one of my toughest matchups because, similar to my judo and boxing training, she had a black belt in Brazilian Jiujitsu and was noted for her Muay Thai striking. She had never been submitted. What people trying to draw parallels between our stylistic similarities did not understand was that no woman on the planet is capable of matching up with me stylistically.

The entire time I was coming up through MMA, Edmond used to tell me that styles make fights. The styles of two people in a fight could bring out the best in each fighter, and the fight itself could be better. Or the styles could be so mismatched, where my style is so good at beating yours, that even though we're at an equal skill level, it'll seem like an extremely lopsided fight.

No matter who fought me, no matter her skill level or her style, I wanted every fight to look like an extremely lopsided fight.

When I set out to do MMA, I wanted to create a style that could never be beaten. It wasn't about being good at judo or boxing, it was about creating the perfect MMA style; it would be one that had no weakness. I spent years building that style. It's something I will continue to work on my entire career, but by the time I faced Davis, I knew that no one could match up with me in the Octagon.

During the lead-up to the fight, Davis was asked again and again about my armbar. “I definitely think I am going to be able to stop the armbar,” Davis said. “This is something I train for constantly every day. . . . It's not a problem for me. Black belts armbar me every day. I am not afraid to say that, but you know what? I defend armbars more often than I get them.”

What no one seems to realize is that I try to come out different for every single fight, so whatever footage my opponent was studying before is obsolete when she comes out to fight me.