THE FIGHTER, THE MATCHMAKER, THE LOVER, THE CARD GIRL, & THE FAN GIRL

Women are no longer on the fringes of Mixed Martial Arts. Whether they are fans, organizers or participants, if you cut them they will bleed.

Even if you don’t know what ( or rather, who) GSP stands for, even if you can’t imagine what a rear- naked choke looks like without blushing, and even if you had no idea that Calgary has been home to regularly scheduled live mixed martial arts fights since 2009, you can still probably recognize this name: Ronda Rousey.

That woman is everywhere. The UFC women’s bantamweight champion— with her 12- 0- 0 record, her trash- talk ( Google DNB), and her knack for fight- finishers within seconds of the first bell— invades my Internet every time I click it on. The most notable and notorious face of MMA is, as of today, a woman. And still, some people likely believe that women don’t belong anywhere near the octagon, on either side of the chain link. To them, I say: sorry/ not sorry. Because without the women who help make up the Calgary MMA community— the fighters, the partners, the matchmaker, the card girls and the fans— each cage match might be a real fight. Maybe. But it wouldn’t be real life.

THE FIGHTER

When Stephanie Essensa fights, her nose bleeds. It does not happen in practice. But when she’s in the cage in front of a screaming crowd, her nose gushes from even minor hits. She will bristle when she reads this; she will hate that I started this way. Because when I bring it up to her, Essensa’s shoulders scrunch up and her face tightens. “It doesn’t bleed in the gym. It’s bizarre.”

It bothers her because her traitorous nose makes her look more hurt than she is, and she doesn’t want to lose points should a particular judge hold it against her when her fights come down to a decision.

But my first impression of Essensa is a long dashed line of blood from her nose to her thigh when she fought Lynnell House on the first fight card I ever witnessed: Hard Knocks 41, nine months ago. I was transfixed not so much by the blood but by Essensa’s obliviousness to it, her composed indifference to something that would make the rest of us stop, grab a tissue, ask for our moms. House brawled while Essensa calculated, and Essensa won the fight by unanimous decision after three five- minute rounds.

I admired Essensa then, but since she and I spent a Friday afternoon talking in the dojo where she’s grown up fighting, ArashiDo Martial Arts in Red Deer, I admire her for another reason. She’s known herself, who she is and what she wanted to do, since she was a kid. She play- fought with the boys. She buzzed her hair off as a teenager— because even the slightest scalp pull irritates her in fights— and it’s been that way ever since ( other fighters in her dojo call it “the Stephanie”). She loved the Rocky movies when she was young, but instead of pretending to box in her bedroom after watching them ( like I did), Essensa walked into a gym to fight for real. She was only 14 years old.

At 17, she began training with Arashi- Do’s Gary Vig, and she’s basically lived at the dojo ever since, running the front- end, teaching, and, of course, fighting. Like many MMA fighters, she began in another discipline ( Rousey has an Olympic bronze medal in judo), and Essensa’s first public fight was a kickboxing match at 21. It was in Medicine Hat and she fought a 17- year- old hometown girl.

“I got to be the bad guy,” Essensa says. Her most enduring memory is the sound of silence she created by beating her opponent. She loved it. In fact, Essensa would rather not be a favourite. The cheering of a supportive crowd is too much pressure, and she’s too shy. She’d