But expenses start to pile up even though I live at home. There’s the gas money, obviously, but I’m also spending quite a bit on gear and my phone bill, and there’s the need for basic spending cash. I start teaching ballet and tap dance classes at a studio in Reno to generate some income. I’m there two days per week, and the rest of the days my body and brain are in Sacramento, cultivating my arsenal. At the end of some training sessions I’m so physically and mentally drained that I can’t fathom getting into a car and driving for two hours.
One day, while I am taking my jujitsu class, I notice my phone buzzing with a text. When I look, I see two missed calls, as well as a text from that same caller saying he or she is trying to get in touch—the latter of which seems odd because I don’t recognize the number and the tone of the text suggests that I should. The first thought that comes to me is Seth. I take a small bit of pleasure knowing that if Seth were to show up again in my life now, I could probably kick the shit out of him. But that asshole is capable of anything, so I think twice before calling or texting back. I decide to do nothing. One hour passes. Two. Three. I can’t help it—curiosity finally gets the best of me. I want to know who it is. I lock myself in the bathroom and quietly press “Call Back.”
“Hello?” It’s a man’s voice.
“Hello… May I ask who this is? I missed a call from this number,” I say.
“Oh yes, hi. Am I speaking with Paige VanZant?” the voice asks.
“You are,” I say quietly, still reluctant.
“Hi, Paige. This is Dana White.”
My skin goes hot, my heart starts to race, and my palm suddenly feels wet around the phone at my ear. Getting a personal call from the likes of Dana White, the president of the Ultimate Fighting Championship himself. Thanks to my dad’s obsession with MMA, I’ve known who he is since I was a little kid.
“Are you sure?” I ask, unable to fathom the truth, and a little irritated that anyone would want to mess with me like this.
“Yeah, I’m pretty damn sure,” he says, chuckling now. “I’ve chosen you to compete in The Ultimate Fighter, a reality TV show produced by the UFC, where fighters are split into teams and compete for the chance to officially join the UFC. Does this sound like something that interests you?” I crumble to the floor, clutching my phone at my heart, incapable of grasping his words. A chance to join the UFC is every MMA fighter’s dream. This cannot be happening.
When I tell Mom, she cried and tells me she’s proud of me, but she doesn’t want me to get my hopes up. “Just don’t get too excited until you know for sure,” she says over the phone. Dad doesn’t say anything. I wonder what he thinks. And sure enough, days pass without even a peep on my phone. I start to think Mom might be right. Why would Dana White call me out of nowhere? But soon enough, I get a follow-up call from his office. It’s true, he wants me on the show. In the end, this is bittersweet in and of itself because I also realize that at nineteen, I’m still too young to participate—you have to be at least twenty-one, since alcohol is served in the house where the fighters live. It’s like having the most amazing opportunity of your career dangled out of reach in front of you. I’m crushed, pissed, and energized all at once.
“It’s OK,” Dad says. “At least you’re in Dana White’s orbit now. That’s not nothing.”
And Dad is right, because shortly thereafter, I receive an envelope. I quickly tear it open—it’s a four-fight UFC contract.
I may be too young for the TV show—but I’m apparently old enough to be a professional fighter. This is huge. To put it in perspective, this is like getting an NFL contract. This could very well be the single most exciting moment of my career… my life even.
I can’t afford a lawyer, so I comb through the agreement on my own, doing my best to decipher the legal lingo. I don’t understand every little detail, but I know enough to seize an opportunity like this one, and I sign it that very same day. It’s a four-fight contract that lays out the terms for how I’ll make money when I fight with the league. I earn when I fight. The more I win, the more often they’ll try to re-sign me. The letter also lets me know that I will be one of eleven women in a new category called the strawweight division. I don’t know the other fighters in the division personally, but what I do know is that they all have way more fight experience than I do. But I don’t care. I’m going after it. This is beyond a game changer. It’s a life changer.
“I’m impressed, but not surprised,” Mom says sweetly. “You were always a tough little thing.” I can’t imagine what it must be like for a mother—even my mother, who is married to a die-hard wrestler—to live with the reality that her kid will get physically attacked for a living. She seems genuinely happy and terrified at the same time, which I guess is to be expected. And as for Dad, UFC contract or not, his veneer of stoicism never lets up. I know he’s excited; he silently roots for me.
I have my first fight contract, and my first fight is months away. Now that I’m signed with the UFC, my name is out there. I need to live up to it. The first order of business is to set up my fight camp, which I decide to do at Team Alpha Male, despite the distance and commute from Reno. It’s annoying, but I’m used to the drive by now, and there’s no better place to set up than at Team Alpha, where the classes are more advanced and high level than anywhere else I’ve been. Fight camp is essentially the place a fighter designates as his or her training base for a period before the fight. It also refers to the five- to six-week period before a fight that is focused and extreme, in which the ultimate goal is to get the fighter in the best possible shape, conditioned optimally for the fight, crisp in her movements, and armed with a dynamic range of refined MMA tools. When fight camp starts, the clean diet starts, and there is no time off. During fight camp, there is total devotion and unflinching strictness.
Urijah lays out what I should eat. It’s a lot of healthy fats, lean protein, plant protein, fresh vegetables, and lemon water. No cheat meals. No alcohol. No dairy, unless it’s yogurt. And definitely no sugar—not even from fruit. This is about getting as lean as possible, by replacing any trace of fat with muscle, some kind of BMI nirvana.
Urijah also sets me up with the best coaches in his gym. I train so hard my body feels like it’s going to break. The goal is twofold: for me to get as strong and fast as possible overall, but to also advance each of my individual MMA skill sets and techniques. In this way, fight camp feels like a personal Olympics—I’m training in Brazilian jujitsu, Muay Thai, wrestling, and boxing separately. For my cardio, I run for miles every morning and do crazy punching bag workouts that leave me so breathless I can’t speak a full sentence after I’m done.
As we get closer to the fight, some of the training sessions are structured like MMA fights themselves—as five distinct rounds—with the goal of integrating as many of the different fight elements in those short bursts of time, and so I can start getting used to these short bursts of fight periods.
With Urijah’s help, I also start to work with two professional managers, Mike and Jeff at MMA Inc., who take care of all my official MMA business and help create ways for me to gain access and exposure. From scheduling and media appearances to sponsorship opportunities, these guys have my back. For the first time, with Urijah and now Mike and Jeff, I feel like I have a proper fight team. I feel fully supported. When my car breaks down in Sacramento one day, it is Mike who comes to my rescue. These people become family.
My new managers want me to get my head around what it means to fight in a UFC cage. They give me two tickets to watch a fight in Sacramento, and of course I take my dad. We set off on the now very familiar drive through the mountains to get there. I don’t even know who is fighting. What I do know is the feeling in the space, the excitement in the air, the energy of the crowd, the adrenaline pumping in both corners, the theatrics of the whole thing. I love it. Dad stares into the octagon the whole time, his eyes fixed, his heart rapt. I wonder if he’s proud. After all, this is the guy who told me to not bother coming home as
a teen unless I’d bloodied up my bully. I allow myself to enjoy that thought as I watch the fight go down.
I try to stay focused and forward thinking. I block out the possibilities of injuries. I know they can happen, and I know they can be severe and even life threatening. There’s no getting around the fact that fractures, concussions, and knee injuries can be no joke. I hear about one fighter who got knocked out in practice so hard that he suffered a life-changing concussion. He gets dizzy and he has problems sleeping—and worst of all, he’ll never fight again. I know bad things can happen, but I have to keep my awareness on my strength and have faith. Mom rightfully worries about these types of things.
“You can do this,” Dad says. “You’re tough. You’re the only girl on Team Alpha Male, you’re a UFC fighter. Go get it.”
One morning while training in Sacramento, I feel a shooting pain through my whole spine, and pins and needles at my fingertips and toes. Something is wrong with my back. Unfortunately, it’s not the first time I have felt it—it’s a recurring injury from my dance days as a kid, when I was told by a doctor I suffered back disk regeneration. I had felt traces of it again in Las Vegas, and I’d thought it was just a fluke, maybe associated with stress. But here it is again, this time burning up my entire lower spine. Any movement I make increases this pain, which feels electric between the bones. I can barely get up off the mattress. I grab my phone, which is luckily nearby, and call my dad, who is on his way to work.
“It’s already seven thirty a.m. You’re at the gym, right?” is how he answers.
“Dad, I can’t move. My back is hurt. I don’t know what to do.”
“You need to get to a doctor, that’s what.”
But I don’t have health insurance in California. I’ll have to drive home. I’m supposed to keep a strict routine to prep for the fight, so I can’t afford any sudden schedule detour. This is a setback. I’m crushed. What if I can’t fight?
Driving back home, I try to put things into perspective. My back thing isn’t new; I shouldn’t act so surprised or enraged. I do, after all, lead a rigorous physical life. A recurring back injury is just something I’m going to figure out how to wrangle in the context of my budding career.
The injury humbles me. It reminds me of the innate fragility of my own body. It highlights the irony of being a violent fighter, yet being taken down by something as quiet and passive as a slipped disk in my back. I suppose when you train so physically hard and push yourself in fights to such extremes, you forget that despite it all, you’re still flesh and bone.
Between the many visits to a chiropractor and a physical therapist, I learn that I have not one but three herniated disks in my lower back. I’ll need to spend hours upon hours stretching my spine out. The therapist gives me a list of exercises to work on every day. I’m meant to do some with his help and some on my own at home. All of them are excruciating.
“You’re going to need at least six to eight months of this,” the therapist says, cracking his own neck while he talks. “And you’ll have to take it easy in training. I’ll have to vet all your exercises to make sure they’re even safe for you to do. In six months, we can talk about your fight.” Murphy’s law. Just when I feel the momentum surging, with my first UFC fight so close, this injury has to flare up.
“Don’t worry,” Urijah says on a call, calming me. “Worst case, we can ask them to postpone it.” This makes me feel slightly more at ease. “The most important thing is for you to be healthy, so do whatever it takes to get there.” I begin to make peace with reality and start strategizing how to overcome it.
Even though I am attached to Team Alpha Male, I decide to train in Reno. It’s where I live and where I’ll be doing all the physical therapy. With my lower-back injury, it just doesn’t make any sense to drive four hours through the mountains. If I want to heal, I need to be practical. I will have to make do with the coaches at the local gym—and who knows how much I’ll be able to train anyway?
When I’m at the gym it’s a push-pull between the extreme pain I feel in the lower part of my body and the ferocity with which I want to throw strikes with my fists and elbows. I want to break through the pain so I can move onto winning this thing.
“Go easy,” the trainer says one day while I’m doing a set of deep squats.
“Nothing good comes easy,” I say, wincing through the pulsing, electric pain that’s standing in the way of me and my first fight. The more physical therapy I do, the better I start to feel. Gradually, I start to heal. And the less pain I feel, the harder I start to work at the gym.
My injury gives me even greater respect for the human body. I start treating my body with even more care, eating right, resting more. Being a fighter means my body is my tool. I have to keep it optimized.
“I’m ready to fight,” I tell my managers. “Let’s go to war.” And with that, the fight is back on the calendar and I’m back to fight camp insanity.
And then the hate mail comes. I should have known. How could I not have known that the stubborn demons of the past would soon awaken and come slithering toward me again? And of course, here they appear right when I feel weak. How could I have been so naive as to think stuff like this ever really goes away? This particular piece of hate mail comes in the form of an image of me photoshopped awkwardly with one of my opponents, the words “real fighter” under the opponent’s name, the word “garbage” beneath mine. I can’t help but wonder if this ridiculousness has any connection to the girls who threw garbage at me in high school. A younger me would crumble just thinking about this stuff. But now I understand how nasty the power of envy can get. I don’t hate the haters—they fuel me with more passion.
With four weeks left until my first UFC fight, the most important thing is that I make weight twenty-four hours before the fight, as fighters get weighed by doctors in this very official and sometimes public way. Making weight is how fighters shed pounds quickly before a fight to meet the criteria of their specific weight class. As a strawweight, I have to come in at 115 pounds.
Cutting weight sucks; it’s one of the most physically intense things I have ever done. There’s a very precise science to it, the goal being to be on-weight for the shortest period of time and still somehow not be the smaller fighter. I have to work with a nutritionist to maximize nutritional density against caloric intake. It’s a lean, clean protein regimen with lots of vegetables, absolutely zero sodium, and two gallons of water every day. No prepared foods, no milk, no dairy, no bread. Even though it’s a lot of water, I feel dehydrated all the time. The restrictions are so abrupt that I sometimes feel faint or have a hard time hearing. For men, cutting weight seems to happen more smoothly, but this hits me like a Mack truck. I read somewhere that medical experts believe that losing more than 5 percent of your body weight in water is considered unsafe, that it can make your organs shut down, and I’m losing double or triple that to make weight for this fight.
The night before I weigh in, I’m still four pounds over 115. I have to go extreme if I want to bring that number down in twenty-four hours. Luckily, Alexa is with me and can help. Urijah tells us about this trick to cut the weight fast. It involves me soaking in a lava-hot bath, sprinkled with Epsom salts and rubbing alcohol, for as long as I can handle the heat. When I exit the bath, Alexa “mummifies” me in as many blankets and towels as I can handle, keeping a little window open so she can see my face and make sure I don’t pass out. After half an hour, I stand up, and Alexa right away uses a credit card to scrape the sweat coming off my skin from head to toe. It’s the effect of a squeegee but on a human, and we laugh the whole time. After a few rounds of that, I finally make weight. My first UFC fight.
I start drinking fluids, but not too fast, otherwise I’ll get sick. The next morning at breakfast, I start introducing foods back into my stomach. I can’t eat the wrong foods or I’ll get violently ill. No Hooters fries for this fight.
Now that I’m officially with the UFC and part of the new strawweight division, all
the fighters have to show up in Texas not just for the fights, but also for the big marketing events to help promote. We have to autograph posters and chat with fans, and attend a press conference—with me pinching myself the whole time because I can’t believe this is my life.
There are certain moments when you step outside yourself and watch the scenes of your experience unfold like little gifts, these mystical fragments of time that you get to self-witness. Such moments sparkle like gems in your personal history. Walking into the octagon for my first UFC fight in Austin is one such moment for me. It is like walking into a realm of new possibility, surged by the promise of my own potential. The crowd is going crazy. I walk in, knowing I have to savor this moment, acknowledging that this is unique and that something special is happening.
My goal is clear: to be the star of the strawweight class and take home the belt. I’m up against a fighter named Kailin Curran. But since I’ve studied tapes of her previous fights, I have a sense of how she moves. I can strategize my evasions. I start by pressing her hard against the cage, which is how I establish myself, to lay down my toughness; but she uses a knee reap position from her back to sweep me. That’s OK—I’m just getting started. I do everything I can to get her off her feet in round 2, which works well: she can’t break free. And even when she gets close, I pin her to the cage again with all my force, unrelenting. Then I get another takedown in round 3 and I keep hitting her with decisive sharp punches. She’s wilting quickly—I can feel the wave of triumph coming. The referee stops the fight at 2:54 and I am declared the winner. I melt onto the mat, into my own disbelief, feeling the surge of all my efforts coursing through me. I cry through my mouthpiece, my eyes squeezed shut, the roar of the crowd the most beautiful sound ever.
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