One fighting chance left to win big
On the last Thursday afternoon in May, American UFC fighter Sara McMann hopped into her maroon Mini Cooper and drove three hours across the border to Greensboro, North Carolina.
Before she arrived at Triad Math and Sciences Academy to deliver a speech at an athletics banquet that evening, she punched in six ideas about her life into the notes section of her iPhone.
A few years ago, this wouldn’t have been possible. McMann wouldn’t have been able to stand in front of a group of about 300 people and tell them that her parents struggled with heroin addiction, and that she grew up at times without electricity or heat.
She wouldn’t have been able to tell them that her brother was brutally murdered in 1999. She wouldn’t be able to tell them that five years after that, the man she planned to marry died in a car accident - and that she was the driver.
The talk was about resilience, so McMann told them that even after enduring that endless pain, she still plans to become a UFC world champion. She knows the clock is ticking on her chance to reach the pinnacle of her sport.
McMann, a former Olympic medallist, is 36 years old and a single mother. She is the sixthranked challenger in the women’s bantamweight division and, despite winning her last three fights, is still searching for a career-making victory over an elite opponent.
The talk was delivered with McMann in the middle of a reinvention, throwing herself out into the world like she never has before. She is using her platform while she can to open up about her experiences.
She has refined her skills as a mixed martial artist over the past year, and is planning on moving to California with her daughter next month to train with an established professional outfit.
She is far more willing to promote herself than she had been: The move will also be made be in pursuit of endorsements not readily accessible in South Carolina. And on September 9, she is scheduled to fight Ketlen Vieira in Edmonton at UFC 215, the biggest stage of mixed martial arts, with a chance to strengthen her case as a top contender.
‘‘I’m not sitting around going at this lax pace. I’m pushing the pace,’’ McMann said.
‘‘Maybe my fate will be a little sealed because of my losses, or maybe some fights that were less exciting, but I turned a corner in my career. And I’m just asking for them to invest. Invest now in me, and I will fulfill my end of the bargain.’’
That is a promise McMann intends to keep, though she has learned that so much of her destiny is out of her control.
McMann is not a natural writer, but she has begun thinking about a possible memoir. She could begin her story with her parents, who moved the family constantly between Maryland, Pennsylvania and North Carolina.
Her parents were drug addicts, she said, and she is haunted by the time she found her mother passed out on the floor of their home in Maryland after an overdose. Sara was 6.
Her mother survived the ordeal, but it only brought Sara closer to her brother, Jason, a natural athlete who wrestled at Quince Orchard High School in suburban Washington and inspired his younger sister to try out for the boys’ wrestling team when she was 14.
McMann was in her freshman season on the wrestling team at the University of MinnesotaMorris when Jason disappeared in January 1999. His mutilated and decomposed body was found about three months later in the woods near Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, but his case went cold. McMann’s family appeared on America’s Most
Wanted in an effort to find his killer.
It took nearly three years before authorities zeroed in on Fabian Desmond Smart, a football player at Lock Haven University who had beaten Jason with a gun and a stick after an altercation at a party before leaving him in the woods to die.
By that point, a grieving McMann had transferred to Lock Haven University and was training with the men’s wrestling team.
She competed in her brother’s memory, learning how to channel the pain of her loss into countless victories on the mat. She won the Olympic silver medal in the 63kg weight class in 2004, when women’s freestyle wrestling made its debut at the Athens Games.
At 23, McMann was the face of US women’s wrestling when she returned to the States later that summer. In Athens, a romance blossomed with 27-year-old Steven Blackford, a former all-American wrestler at Arizona State who was attending law school in Washington that fall. McMann would move with him and begin a new chapter near her birthplace of Takoma Park. The couple planned to marry.
They would start their new life together with a cross-country trip after leaving the US Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs on September 3, 2004. Around 1.20pm, as McMann drove her 1997 Jeep Cherokee east on Interstate 76, her vehicle drifted toward the centre lane.
She over-corrected and the vehicle rolled off the shoulder. Neither McMann nor Blackford were wearing seat belts and both were ejected. Blackford died at the scene, and McMann was hospitalised with minor injuries. McMann was eventually charged with reckless driving.
About a month after the accident, Smart was convicted of first-degree murder of Jason McMann. Sara retreated deep within herself, forced to bear the pain of losing her brother and future husband within five years of each other.
While no one understood the depths of despair that McMann reached in the years after, people would often ask her how she became so tough.
‘‘It’s not innate, it’s not something you were born with, and you have to decide every day,’’ she said.
McMann decided to go on, though it would take years to cope and every day would provide its own fight. She went back to training as a wrestler, realising more than ever the kind of joy it brought her life. (She would make her professional debut in MMA in 2011.)
She eventually started to work toward a master’s degree in mental health counselling, which helped her compartmentalise her thoughts on the losses that had shaped her. Part of dealing with it was fiercely guarding her privacy and simply not talking about it openly.
She tried to rebuild her life in South Carolina after meeting Trent Goodale, a former Iowa wrestler who became the head wrestling coach at Limestone College in Gaffney, South Carolina, in 2008. A year later, the couple had a daughter named Bella, who became an anchor as McMann continued her process of healing.
‘‘She has good coping mechanisms. She has that old style, ‘You can’t sit around and pout, suck it up and let’s move on,’ ‘‘ said Monte Cox, McMann’s manager. ‘‘And I think Bella is the reason.’’
It wasn’t until 2013, the year McMann made her UFC debut and nearly nine years after Blackford’s death, that McMann decided to begin sharing her story with students.
McMann is a single mother first and foremost - she is no longer in a relationship with Goodale - so her obsession with winning a title belt could wait one morning in late May.
She slipped on a dark baseball shirt, jeans and a pair of UFC sandals to attend Bella’s secondgrade graduation at Shoally Creek Elementary outside of Greenville. Nobody recognised McMann as she strolled into the school and started filming her daughter with her iPhone.
‘‘She’s so embarrassed,’’ McMann said with a laugh. She sat alone in the cafeteria of the school and ate cashews to store energy for her workout later that afternoon.
She followed Bella to her classroom to watch a slide show of memories from the school year, and her daughter wiped cupcake frosting on McMann’s nose before proudly handing her a book of her writing.
McMann has not yet told her daughter about everything she has been through, about her difficult upbringing, about Jason or Steven. She doesn’t know when that day will come, but for now, she wants to enjoy moments like these.
"I'm not sitting around going at this lax pace. I'm pushing the pace." Sara McMann