THE FIGHT OF MY LIFE
Joanne Calderwood reveals the long, lonely and dark path that has led her from Kilmarnock to Vegas and becoming the first Scot to challenge for a UFC title
SHE will soon step into the light. She confesses she is coming from a place of darkness. On a night to be arranged, in a venue to be confirmed, Joanne Calderwood will this summer walk towards the octagon in a stadium shuddering with booming music, take a breath and then face the biggest challenge in a fighting career that now stretches over t wo decades.
Calderwood has travelled from a hall in Kilmarnock to the very heights of the UFC. At 33, she is the first Scot to fight for a UFC world title. The challenge in Valentina Shevchenko, a contender for best pound-forpound fighter in the world, is immense. The feeling, though, will be familiar.
‘I will be in the zone,’ she says from her home in Las Vegas. ‘I get into it when we do the stare-off the day before. You lock eyes with someone and you know that it is on. Before the fight, you are trying to stay calm and not let your thoughts run away with you. It’s a stressful time. You are in front of thousands of people who are ready to see you lose or get hurt.’
The conditions for the title fight are not known, nor whether any fans will be allowed to attend. Calderwood will be impervious, untouchable. This is how she will feel.
She adds: ‘I am in the moment. I am doing my breathing. I’m having good thoughts. This is where I am supposed to be. You don’t want to go: “Oh s***, oh s***, where is the nearest exit?” That takes experience. It never gets easier, it never gets any better…’
But she will step into the most unforgiving arena for the 19th time in her UFC career. She will inflict and accept pain. ‘I tell you something. It hurts more when you lose,’ she says with a smile that illuminates the Zoom screen but cannot disguise the brutal truth of the octagon.
She expands on her theme: ‘Adrenalin takes over. You don’t feel much. I broke my nose in a fight. I could hear the crack. I felt: “Oh s***”. But if you think it is bleeding, it is hurting, all those thoughts, then you are not thinking about what you are doing. I got back in the fight.’
This toughness has survived a torrent of blows, psychological and physical. The latter is addressed thus: ‘What is the worst that can happen? You get knocked out or you break something.
‘If you get a little blood…’ she pauses before adding: ‘Every fight my nose bleeds. I just paint it on my face. That’s my way of saying: “I don’t give a s***. I am here to fight and I am here to win”.’
The bluntness of those words, the stark crudeness of them in print give only a glimpse of Calderwood. She is far more nuanced, more clever, more reflective than any attempt to reduce her to a stereotypical machine for pain received and delivered. She is a fighter, though, in all the layered substance of that definition.
‘I was very good at the start, lost my way in between and I have got it back now,’ she says of her UFC career that has brought her 14 victories. ‘I’ve always been honest,’ she adds, almost unnecessarily.
She has spoken in the past on her difficulties with depression and anxiety and her decision to stop drinking. As the sun seeps into her living room in Vegas, she talks quietly of her ‘dark place’.
She says: ‘Kids and people in Scotland were looking at me getting this chance to make a difference to my life, making a hobby my career, and I am in this dark place.
‘I look back on it now and say: “Jeez, I shouldn’t have been there but maybe I am in that place because someone else is in that place and they see that there is light at the end of the tunnel”.
‘Look what I have done. My career was at the end of the road but I managed to turn that around. I put that down to never giving up.
‘In the darkest places, I could have said I was giving up, going back to Scotland, but I have always managed to turn it around, even at the very last moment. I think people can get inspiration from that.’
She points out that mental turmoil occurs routinely in other walks of life, adding: ‘People can get through dark tunnels, dark patches. I would have loved to have been this person who came from Scotland, who went into this turf and got the championship belt and the rest was history. That path wasn’t for me. I try to see this other path as showing me I had to learn and show other people and myself how not to give in.’
This journey has found a purpose and a serenity in Las Vegas. It began in a Muay Thai class in Kilmarnock.
THE DOOR opened. A 13-year-old Calderwood walked through with her brother Jordan, a year younger.
‘When I went into the training hall and put my gear on the whole world stopped,’ she says of her first Muay Thai class.
“I said: “Wow! This is cool, I like this”. It switched off all the frustration, everything. I felt so much better than I ever had. It brought me out of my shell because I didn’t have to worry about anything that was going on outside or at school. I was JoJo in the class, working my ass off. No one saw anything other than dedication and my commitment.’
She became a champion in the discipline, moving on to mixed martial arts and cage fighting. So how has a little girl who walked off a Kilmarnock street into a new life of combat grown to be one step away from a world title?
‘I really don’t think she has changed that much,’ she reflects. ‘There has been a lot of experience and wisdom thrown in there but I see myself as being that quiet, shy
girl who went in there and was a bit lost.’
She talks candidly of being a personality with no distinct focus.
‘I didn’t know what I wanted to do. My bigger sister was really good at school and I felt pressure from the teachers and I didn’t really find what I wanted. I liked to do art, sewing and craft… practical stuff. But nothing like: “This is the way I am going to go, this is the path I am going to go down”.’
An athletic girl, who enjoyed gymnastics and swimming, the epiphany came when she stepped into the hall for that Muay Thai class.
‘All my stresses and frustrations at school — not knowing where I was going or who I was. All that stopped. I was in the moment. Even now, when life gets a little bit busy or I get a little bit stressed, I go back to the moment to feel happy, secure, content. I felt that at the time. I was good at it.’
With only 15 people in the class, she immediately trained with adults. She, of course, gave it her all, continuing impromptu bouts with Jordan at home. Her physical development and technical improvement as a fighter were honed by disciplined training but she was fuelled by something else.
Aware she is talking to a fellow Scot, she says: ‘We have all been brought up with the pressure on. There is this kind of stereotype that you are not going to do anything good. There is this negativity we grow up with and that is very hard to get out of. We have never been told: “You can do anything you want”. At school, as I said, I had real pressure to be like my sister. That shouldn’t be the way a young girl comes up in life.’
She believed teachers thought she would not do anything in life.
‘I thought: “Well, wait and see”. When I found that I loved fighting, I was sticking the fingers up to all those teachers who gave me a hard time,’ she says. ‘I didn’t see my future, I didn’t see how it would pan out, but I just knew I had found something I loved and made me happy. That is all that mattered to me. The rest took care of itself.’
The bout with Shevchenko is an invitation to become something no other Scot has been: a UFC world champion. She is not starry-eyed about the prospect, however.
‘I am not seeing it as I am not supposed to be here,’ she continues. ‘Sometimes I do laugh and think: “Who would have thought a Scottish girl would be here?”. But it shows you that if you don’t give up, if you have that fight in you, that warrior inside you…’
There is an oft-repeated trope in Calderwood interviews that dwells on her femininity, her softness of tone and manners. It can be summarised thus: ‘What is a nice girl like you doing in a place like this?’
It ignores the reality that softness can co-exist with hardness, that vulnerability can live alongside bravery. ‘I am that little bit nasty when I have that killer-instinct thing,’ she says casually of life in the octagon.
She is now more content in her preparation for fights. First, she is coached by her partner John Wood, and, second, she does not have to make the brutal weight cut to the straw weight division of 115. The UFC has introduced the flyweight class at 125lbs and Calderwood is grateful.
‘Physically and emotionally, it was very draining,’ she says of the rigours of weight loss. ‘It took a toll on my life. You take food out of the equation and you are going to be grumpy and not likeable. Towards the end of my straw weight career, I was at an all-time low.’
She agrees Kyrgyzstan-born Shevchenko, who is recovering from injury, is a contender for pound-for-pound champion. ‘I would put her up there. She has earned the title. She has earned her reputation. I respect all of that. But it goes out of the window when you are in a fight. It will be the fight of my career. It is just you and her at the end of the day.’
She spends time with her partner’s daughter, a four-year-old who loves colouring in. Calderwood has ambitions post-fighting that include coaching and, perhaps, family but she shudders at one thought: ‘If my daughter came to me and said she wanted to do what I did, I would be a little like: “Oh no, that’s not the road you want to go down”. It’s a very hard, long and lonely road. I wouldn’t change it for me but it’s hard. You lose family time. You lose friends.’
This is said without a hint of regret. In many ways, Calderwood has not lost the innocence of the Kilmarnock girl. But she is now in Vegas and knows she needs to have a resilient reality.
‘You have to have the switch. That killer instinct. It’s a powerful thing to have and not everyone has it,’ she says. ‘I was born with it. I had it on the streets when I was young when I would have fits of anger if anyone said anything against my family. Now I have channelled it into something good.’
The switch will be activated soon under the brightest of lights. Do not expect Calderwood to blink.