Rise

by Paige VanZant

  I lay down on the floor and weep, releasing my full weight into what feels like a sacred victory, as my spirit soars through the cage. I can see Mom and Dad sitting in the front row. She’s crying. He’s got his arms crossed, but there’s a half smirk on his face, and his eyes are welled up. Even though our fight was nine bouts before the main event, it wins Fight of the Night and I make history as the second-youngest female in the UFC. Suddenly I’m no longer just a professional fighter—I’m a UFC victor. I have validation. I have a title. I have respect. I also have a $50,000 bonus that comes with the Fight of the Night recognition. This is getting real.

  People are paying attention now. I’m officially on the map. The fight wasn’t televised, only streamed online. But it goes viral and is trending on social media. Emails come pouring in from people who saw it. We love you, some of them say. You’re such a badass. You’re an inspiration. You’re my hero. These words land on me like medicine. I was surrounded by haters for such a long time, and now I have fans. Their comments bubble around in me, exciting parts of me and healing others. Everything feels at once terrifying and therapeutic.

  My dad doesn’t admit it, but I have never seen him this happy. My career feels like something we get to share. Each win is for both of us, a return to something. It’s almost funny how the world of brutality and violence is where the sweetness of a father-daughter bond could flourish. But flourish it does.

  The next UFC fight is against Felice “Lil’ Bulldog” Herrig, a six-year MMA veteran with an illustrious kickboxing career and tons of fights under her belt. I’m still not totally used to all the ancillary work that comes with these fights, and I again forget to bring a proper outfit to wear at the press conference. All I have is workout clothes with me, so one of the ladies on my management team lends me a dress.

  Blond, pretty, and spunky, Felice comes out on the night of the fight wearing a little leopard-print bottom. She’s a bundle of tightly packed muscles and looks like she’s ready to get down. And this girl is a competition machine—she’s been fighting professionally since I was in high school. Of her last six fights, she’s won five. She’s a big-name fighter who has been defeated only by decision. My dad has flown out to New Jersey with me, we’re on the main card on Fox, and it’s a Saturday night—a constellation of high-stakes variables that inspires even more hustle from me. The face-off is almost surreal, the two of us at exactly 115 pounds, at around the same height, blond braids woven flat down the sides and backs of our heads. Both of us are relentlessly scrappy and hell-bent on winning, but there can be only one winner.

  Felice is seasoned, and serious—and I’m essentially the new kid. The tension is thick between us. During round 1, I go in hard and totally swarm her. Maybe it’s too much too soon, but there’s only one goal flashing in front of me: finish her and finish her fast. Now that she knows what I’m made if, in round 2 I really attack. Even when I fall to the ground, I snap back up. I go in and get her in a clinch and I wrestle her up against the cage. She may have taken my back quickly, but once I’m up I have control of the fight. I get her down and unleash a barrage of ground-and-pound strikes to her face. I scramble faster than she does, with zero lag time in my movements, all pace and pressure, and I never relent. She’s a more experienced grappler, but so far, I’m dominating her. In round 3, I batter her with hammer fists, which is when you strike an opponent with a clenched fist, using the side of the hand or wrist. After a grueling fifteen-minute fight, I win with a clean sweep on the scorecards. I prove that what she has in experience, I have in resilience. One of the commentators refers to it as “a changing of the guard” moment in UFC history. Even Dana White tweets, “Paige VanZant is a badass!!!! So young and fights her ass off.”

  I don’t know what’s happening, but I love it. I love winning. I love the mastery, the confidence it all inspires, the fact that it’s so high stakes and crazy and wild. I love how it forces me to contend with my own badassery, that it doesn’t have time for weakness. I love the people. I love their commitment. I love the respect. I love the freedom in the cage to release the beast within myself and tear someone up as a means to victory. I have to keep going.

  The next fight happens in the fall, against Alex “Astro Girl” Chambers, an Australian fighter who is a whopping fifteen years older than me. I am being called a rising star and people argue more and more about whether I deserve or have earned it. I thought that winning fights would make it easier for me, but in reality it raised everyone’s expectations for the next fight, and the attention and stress are raised as well. Since it’s in Las Vegas, my friend Alexa is with me, to help me prep. She’s been down the making-weight rabbit hole with me before, so she well knows that the twenty-four hours prior to a weigh-in can get really weird. I’m a couple of ounces over 115 again, so we have to get creative.

  “I know what to do,” Alexa says decisively. “Strip down.” She disappears into her toiletry bag. I take off my clothes and she comes back with a pink Daisy razor and a bottle of shaving cream. “I got this,” she says, lathering my arms and legs with foam and shaving all four of my limbs down to newborn-baby softness. I get on the scale again. Still a few ounces over. She disappears back into her bag of tricks, and this time comes back with a pair of scissors. She wraps me in towels. “Sit.” Then Alexa combs my hair and without asking or thinking or second-guessing or even running it by me, she starts snipping off chunks of my hair. “We gotta do what we gotta do,” she says. And sure enough, after this impromptu grooming, the two of us cracking up like a pair of hyenas, my weight is on point, and Alexa once again wins at making everything perfect.

  The MGM Grand Garden Arena in Vegas is as dramatic a venue as one can imagine. There are seats as far as the eye can see. Fighting here is like fighting on one of the main stages of the world. Now that I have a few of these fights under my belt, there are certain things that I know about myself. Number one: I like to set the tone for the fight. I like to let it be known with crystal clarity that my aggression in the cage is limitless, and that despite my smile and sweet green eyes, I am at war. During the first round my tempo is so quick she can’t really keep up with me. My attitude is forward-pushing the whole time. When I have her in a clinch, I go at her with hard knees and strikes. I wear her down. This goes on for another two rounds, to no avail for her, and then in the third round, I drop her and go at her with a ground-and-pound battery, which is when you take the dominant position—it can be on top, in a half mount, or standing in your own guard—and unleash a fury of elbows, punches, forearm strikes, or all of the above. I use this position to achieve an arm bar, which is an arm lock that hyperextends the elbow joint, and which causes her to tap out, at 1:01.

  “You did it again!” Alexa screams, squeezing me after the fight, ignoring my stink and all the sweat on my body. I cry and laugh at the same time, every one of these wins feeding into my growing obsession with victory.

  “I know! This is crazy!” I say, now throwing myself in the arms of my Team Alpha Male coaches.

  “And that girl is a lot older than you, with tons more experience,” Urijah reminds me. “You can do anything, Paige. The word we need to focus on now is ‘limitless.’”

  I begin to move through life with more confidence. I drop into this flow of progress. It feels so good to make money doing something that I love, something I’m good at, something that means something to me beyond just being a sport. It feels good to step into the realness of this space where life is thought through and methodical, organized, and disciplined. It feels good to surprise people, to shock them, to silence the naysayers. It feels good to get stronger, savvier, more serious, to ride a wave of positivity that starts with my very own efforts. Dad comes to all my fights and says nothing. Even though his presence and company feel great, I wish he’d just once say, “Hey, I’m proud of you.” Or maybe I have it all wrong, and it’s precisely his stoic silence that pushes me to go harder. I suppose I both love and hate him for it. Mom doesn’t come at all—it’s too muc
h for her, which is fine, because nervous energy is the last thing I need in the cage.

  My email inbox is suddenly out of control. There is a mountain of messages to get through, as well as countless voice mails. Journalists, reporters, and photographers are calling all the time. I get lots of requests for interviews and photos, and my managers help me sift through them and decide which ones to take. I see how quick these writers are to angle the conversation, to spin my story in whatever way they please. People want to know my story. They almost can’t believe I exist. I duck and dodge their attempts and stay strategic about driving the interviews. I won’t have anyone dig indiscriminately into my past.

  With so many media requests and fights cooking on the horizon, my managers don’t want me to become overwhelmed. They try to strike a balance between pacing things and stoking the fire. We all feel the momentum, but we need to make sure I don’t burn out. But then Reebok calls, and the sponsorship opportunity it offers catalyzes everything. Collaborating with a giant like Reebok puts me on the map in a very public way; but more important, it affords me the chance to finally live and train in Sacramento full time. I don’t even care about what the apartment looks like, or how big it is, or if it’s furnished or not. I just need a room to rent where I can throw down a mattress and sleep on it when I need to. I find a cheap, empty room in a small, gritty apartment complex in downtown Sacramento. I sleep on the floor there sometimes when I’m too tired to do the drive back to Reno. Some mornings I wake up with the grain of wooden floor embossed onto the flesh of my cheek, but I pick myself up, thank God, smile, and hustle on. I feel so blessed for the opportunity. It feels like my dreams are starting to come true.

  I get myself a job doing the night shift of membership sales at a 24 Hour Fitness, which is perfect, because it leaves my day open to train. I don’t buy any furniture or make any friends in Sacramento, but I’m not seeing any of that right now. My focus is to train at Team Alpha Male. I go to bed early and eat by myself. I have a purpose and lock into the goal.

  My Reebok deal is quickly embroiled in controversy. One journalist writes that “Reebok must love blondes.” Apparently, people think I’m still too much of a rookie to have the deal at all, and when I make the mistake of posting a flirtatious video of myself wearing items from the Reebok line I’m endorsing, a Twitter storm unfurls. Fellow fighters seem particularly scathed, tweeting things like:

  Just call 1-800-HOT-GIRL and talk to real live girls.

  We can’t frickin wait to answer your call. Call now!

  The whole thing is eerily reminiscent of when I made the cheerleading team in eighth grade and pissed off all my friends—what as an adult I now know how to identify as good old-fashioned envy. Maybe posting that video wasn’t the smartest thing to do—but so what? I’m young, excited about having a deal with Reebok, and social media is a key part of the world in which we live. Mom, being the superwoman that she is, deletes it from my Instagram account before it has a chance to make any more waves. Urijah comes to my defense publicly by saying that it’s not about sponsorships or anything else; rather, “it’s about winning fights.”

  The truth is, I don’t really fit in with the typical girl fighters. Most female MMA athletes have been involved in some kind of competitive martial art since they were young. Fighting has been part of their lives and shaped their outlook. Some fighters take on a badass persona, and I’m not sure if it’s always real or part of branding themselves. Some are just very focused and serious about fighting as a career, as something they want to dedicate their life to. They eat, sleep, and breathe fighting. My point is that most of these women have worked for years, sometimes their entire lives, to get a chance to fight professionally. For me, however, fighting began as an outlet. I didn’t grow up wanting to be an MMA fighter. I didn’t fight because it was a lifelong goal. It’s a way for me to express myself, to celebrate the gifts I have, and to show myself and the world that I am strong. That I can take care of myself. That if you put me in a fair fight, I can find a way to win.

  “Do you think you have an easier time as a fighter because of your appearance?” a female journalist asked me one time after a fight.

  “I think my opponents always underestimate me,” I responded. “But I don’t think it has anything to do with the way I look.” The next day, the headline reads “Paige VanZant Says She Gets Underestimated Because She’s Hot.” Around this time, one of my opponents posted an image of a decapitated Barbie doll tagging me, its head replaced with a photo of her own face, with a little note that reads, “Maybe I’ll get a Reebok deal now!” Luckily, the opportunity to properly knock her out soon presents itself in a fight.

  GO AHEAD, UNDERESTIMATE ME

  It’s UFC Fight Night 80 at the Chelsea Cosmopolitan in Las Vegas, a well-known mixed martial arts event. Our fight is the main event. I have six wins on my résumé, and I’m not backing down for my seventh. Because the strawweight division is new, I can be a world champion. The momentum has been building so much that it feels like Christmas, my birthday, and New Year’s all rolled into one. I’m twenty-one, I’m fighting with the UFC—my life is starting to feel like a sort of cosmic arrival. I settle in with myself, attuned to a path of growth, unwavering in my goals. Having such clear focus and direction gives meaning to every single day: I exist to evolve. And my intention feels volcanic. I walk onto the octagon buzzing with a full-body excitement. I’m up against Rose “Thug” Namajunas, who was in The Ultimate Fighter and got her feet wet as a taekwondo black belt and jujitsu master all before the age of ten. Taekwondo is a Korean martial art with a strong emphasis on head-height kicks and jumping and spinning kicks; whereas jujitsu is more ground game. This means Rose is primed on every possible level, ready for any and all angles of attack. She’s the number three UFC contender in the world and by far a more technical fighter than I am. Rose is beautiful, with her perfect Lithuanian facial structure and pool-blue eyes, an infectious smile, and a gorgeous head of hair—which she shaves defiantly right before our fight. It’s a fight. Not a beauty pageant, she tweets, her freshly buzzed cut featured on social media.

  She takes me down during the first round and batters me with sharp elbows to the face. This girl is strong. My blood tastes warm in the spaces between the mouth guard and my teeth. The gash on my cheek is so bad it’s not just bleeding, it’s gushing.

  “Keep breathing,” my coach says as he slathers globs of Vaseline onto the cut to stop the bleeding, to no avail. “You’re doing great. You have to stay mean for this one.” There’s so much blood in my eyes and ears I may as well be fighting underwater—everything is muffled and blurry. When we’re on our feet she throws sharp, bullet-like punches, beyond my guard. None of the clinch takedowns I typically use are working on her. And as much as it stings to say it, she’s a step ahead of me the whole time. It feels like Rose is in a whole other league of expertise, which might be a result of the fact that I was initially meant to fight Joanne Calderwood, who was forced to pull out five weeks ago and was replaced by Rose, who is currently destroying me. I’m reminded of Dad’s warning that having heart is just one piece of the puzzle. Mastery of skill is the other piece, and Rose has got it on lock. I’m feeling defeated even before I lose.

  In the next round, she gets me into a rear-naked choke so tight I have to remind myself to relax my throat, to take small sips of air through my nose, but I start seeing black spots and feel dizzy. Through a sliver of visibility, I catch a glimpse of the giant screen where the fight is projected and see myself, drenched in my own blood, my eye sliced open. I linger there in that zombie state for a moment and ask myself, Am I done? And still, I don’t tap out. I survive the choke and the battery of fists that follow and when the horn blows, I’m as surprised as everyone else in the room that I’m not actually dead. I may not have the winning hand here, but I am calling up every drop of force I have to prevail.

  By the fourth round, she already has six takedowns. Now she comes at me with not one but two deep arm bars, but
miraculously, I manage to rotate my wrist and slither out from under her—both times! She takes me down a seventh time. And an eighth time during the fifth round. And it’s during this round that she gets me into a rear-naked choke with such a grip that there’s no resisting the pressure on the bones in my throat. It is quite literally a life-or-death moment. And so I tap out and Rose wins by submission. The commentators call it the win of her career. At the press conference after the fight, I sit there all busted up and choke back tears. I ask my parents to leave because if they stay, I’ll bawl the whole time. I hold myself as strong as possible, but the disappointment burns in me.

  It’s my first UFC loss and it feels like a little death. I hate losing more than I love to win, so when it happens, I have to mourn it, take it in and get my head around the lessons it came to teach me. And while the loss against Rose feels like a living hell, I discover that my grit during the fight did not go unnoticed. The fight commentators and media even say that while everyone remembers Rose’s technical skills, they also remember my tenacity. In this way, I lost the fight but I won the respect of the MMA community. I keep reminding myself that this means something.

  One of my teammates, Chad, has a fight that night after mine. I am meant to go, but I just don’t feel up to it. I want to lay in bed and just be quiet and still. I want to replay things in my mind. I want to cry. But my mom quickly snaps me out of it.

  “Get up,” she barks sweetly. “You gotta show up for your people. Now put your big-girl pants on and go handle this,” she says, and rips the hotel room blanket off me. She makes a good point, so I pull myself together and get out there, one foot in front of the other, even though my heart is totally broken. That night I post a selfie of my busted face: