ON THE COVER: TWO FACES OF EVE
The women of the Extreme Fighting Championship know pain, fatigue and fear. They train up to 12 hours a day, and can beat up almost anyone. But no training can make sense of what happens inside the cage,
Oliver Roberts meets the shy women who become fighting machines in the cage
IT’S 7:40pm on Saturday night and I’m leaning against a cold concrete pillar, somewhere in the gauche bowels of Carnival City Casino, watching a really big dude roll around on a padded floor with a 20something girl who weighs probably less than half the big dude but could, given the right circumstances, beat the shit out of him just the same or at least put up a savage fight.
In exactly 20 minutes, this woman — Amanda Lino — will walk into an arena full of people whooping and cheering and pretty much baying for blood, then she’ll step into a fenced hexagon to face her opponent, Jacqualine Trosee.
The objective for both will be to dish out as much hurt as they can, to break and risk being broken and/or dislocated.
These are two individuals you do not want to mess with. Ever. In the four months they’ve been training for this night, these women have been primed into killing machines. And I really mean that. Right now I’m thinking either of them could render you unconscious in under a minute. Later I find out that “under a minute” is way off the mark. It can be much, much, quicker.
SO, yeah, Lino is warming up with this big guy. I saw her a few minutes ago in the changing/prep room and she came across cool and focused but still reasonably amenable. We chatted for a couple of minutes and she grinned and told me she had “something up her sleeve” for the fight.
The aircon in the room we were in had been turned off and it felt hot and uncomfortable. This is to keep Lino’s body warm, in the same way you prep a Formula One car before it leaves the pits.
Now, in the warm-up area, I notice that Lino does not speak and barely makes eye contact with anyone. When she’s on the ground, wrestling the big dude, she lets out sharp puffs of breath as she moves and the guy is saying things like, “Nice, nice, nice,” and, just now when they’re sparring with some hit pads, he’s going “More shots! More shots!”
Lino stops to rest for a moment and grabs a towel from a nearby chair. For an instant our eyes meet and her pupils are huge and there’s nothing behind them and I, feeling a little frightened, avert my gaze.
Only 10 or so metres away in the other warm-up area, Trosee is also punching and kicking away. The sound of her hits is quite shocking. Sharp, resolute thwacks. I met Trosee back in December, while she was training for this fight, and she was so shy and nervous she visibly trembled in our interview. Now she’s wordlessly, exactingly f***ing up an imaginary Amanda Lino.
“It’s like a switch,” Trosee told me in December. “I don’t even know who I am in the cage.”
The cage is another name for the hexagon-shaped ring that these women fight in. Lino and Trosee are two of a handful of females competing in South Africa’s Extreme Fighting Championship (EFC), a competition in which (mostly male) fighters train and fight in the mixed martial arts (MMA) discipline, a brutal sport that combines things such as kick-boxing, wrestling and Muay Thai.
Main card bouts consist of three five-minute rounds; title fights five five-minute rounds. It’s totally nuts — and initially you think it’s really no place for a lady. But that’s exactly what the girls of EFC are proving otherwise.
They don’t care if they get a black eye or have their noses smashed to pieces; as long as they can fight they feel complete, sometimes despite themselves.
“The first time it dawned on me that I hit someone and hurt them was in my first amateur fight,” says Danella Eliasov.
“I hit this girl hard and something in me stopped and said, ‘This doesn’t feel right to some degree,’ but then I sort of carried on.”
Eliasov is a practising psychiatrist, which makes her self-analysis all the more pertinent. Of the four fighters I meet, Eliasov is the most feminine and the least likely looking. If you saw her out of her EFC garb you’d never think she had the ability to pull your head off; this may make her more dangerous.
But there were mutterings from more than one of the girls that Eliasov is something of a poster girl for EFC and that she’s not a real fighter. Whatever. Last February, she became the first South African female to compete in an EFC fight. She fought Hungarian Zita Varju and snapped her elbow joint.
Eliasov doesn’t consider herself aggressive: “Some of the girls are pretty aggressive, but not me. That’s actually something I struggle with. I don’t do this to channel aggression, but sometimes you need to be aggressive and I think I’ve got it in me to turn it on when I need to. I think that helps me in some ways because I’m more analytical when I fight, but sometimes you have to be aggressive, especially when you’re competing.”
The idea of stepping into the hexagon with the intention of crushing a complete stranger’s face is probably not something you should spend too much time thinking about if you’re an EFC fighter.
For a lot of us, it’s hard to imagine wanting to physically harm someone unless they deeply offend us or pose some dire threat. That first serious punch or kick is something that a couple of the women admitted they had to get used to. But when you understand that once you’re in the cage it’s either you or her, the chemical wonders of selfpreservation take hold.
“For me it’s about survival,” says Shana Power. “It’s fight or flight and I kick into fight. There is that surprise that you’ve got that aggression, that dark side you can go into where you hurt people who’ve done nothing to you. It seems a bit twisted. But once you start looking at the sport as a whole it becomes more technical. When you’re throwing punches you’re thinking about points, not about the person you’re hitting or the harm you might be doing to them.”
Power also won her first pro EFC fight by rocking her British opponent Kirsty Davis with a spinning back fist and “shattering” the girl’s fingers in the ensuing punch bath.
“Rocking” is a term you hear often in EFC. To be rocked is to take a very hard hit that doesn’t quite knock you out but leaves you disorientated and in mounds of pain. It sounds absolutely hideous.
“Yes, you panic,” Power says. “With experience you can ride it, but when I think about the first time I got properly hit, it felt like a ton of bricks. You don’t know what hit you and you don’t know where it came from. You’re very disorientated and you know that your opponent is going to try and capitalise on it because they can see you’ve been rocked.”
IT’S that disorientation, that fear, that we’re interested in, isn’t it? I’m no fighter but I’ve come to love EFC, mostly because it’s fun to watch other people getting beaten up.
It’s refreshing to know that what you’re watching is real for a change, and that nobody is going to try and censor it. Of course the fighters are
SHE WAS GETTING INTO BAR FIGHTS EVERY OTHER DAY, WITH MEN (AND BEATING THEM)
highly skilled and supremely fit but it’s strangely pleasurable to watch fear and pain when you know it’s self-inflicted. Sure, there’s a vague sympathy when someone takes a particularly hard hit — but then a second later you’re all cheering en masse, wanting more, more.
What’s that like, that fear? That dark heavy heap of terror and anticipation that Amanda Lino and Jacqualine Trosee are feeling in their lower abdomens (or wherever women feel this kind of thing) right now, less than 10 minutes before they have to step into the hexagon?
Brakpan, home of Carnival City, is a tough enough town as it is. Now you’ve got to walk into a stadium full of flashing lights and heavy metal and a crowd craving blood and pain. Perhaps that’s why most of the fighters, girls and guys, have tattoos. There’s always the chance that an inked symbol or phrase will evoke some metaphysical energy that’ll defend them from the worst of the pain and terror.
“You get very nervous, even a month before,” Trosee says. “But as you get closer to the fight you start calming down. I don’t worry about the people and the hype. I just want to fight, get it over and done with and deal with it from there.”
T RAINING for a fight requires ludicrous commitment. Power, for instance, is at the gym from 5am until 7pm Monday-Friday, and 6am until noon on Saturday. Trosee is at it six to eight hours a day, six days a week.
Eliasov trains slightly less but has her psychiatric practice to run. Most of the training involves sparring, weight-training and fitness drills (as well as a strict diet) but a substantial amount of time also goes into conditioning the mind.
Lino originally joined her gym, Ballito Bulldogs, five years ago to lose weight and stay out of trouble, and by the latter I mean she was getting into bar fights every other day, with men (and beating them).
“I think EFC is the only time I’ve ever hit a girl,” Lino says. “MMA was originally just a way of getting my frustrations out but then my coach tweaked my natural brawling skills and taught me how to channel my anger into something positive rather than negative. When you walk into the hexagon your adrenaline takes over and that’s what you’ve got to control.
“We all get nerves, it’s a natural thing, but you learn how to control it. The feeling is hard to describe. It’s not fear, it’s something else. I couldn’t put it into words for you but that’s what drives us.”
This statement is on my mind when I watch Lino and Trosee walk out into the Big Top Arena and then step into the hexagon. Once the intro music is stopped and the ring announcer walks off and the cage is shut, the whole place goes quiet for a moment.
Lino and Trosee stand on opposite sides, staring each other down. My heart is with Trosee, only because she seems so sweet and lovely. But I’m also rooting for Lino because she has a cool haircut and used to beat up guys and because two days ago was the birthday of her father, who died in a motorbike accident four years ago, and so Lino is tonight fighting in memory of him. One of her tattoos is of her parents on their wedding day.
When the ref gives the signal, a horn sounds and the fight begins. It’s just past 8pm. After four months of training, anticipation and “smack talk”, Lino and Trosee are finally walking towards each other, ready for a fight. And then, barely after I’ve taken my seat ringside, Lino, her back to me, lays into Trosee with quick, vicious handwork. Trosee, I know now, is rocked. Lino somehow gets around her and the next thing — this is like three seconds later — Lino has Trosee in a kind of choke-hold and she’s pounding Trosee’s head which has begun to sway wickedly from sideto-side, completely loose on her shoulders.
Trosee has this confused look, like she doesn’t know what’s happening, or how.
The ref, who also seems caught off guard, hurries in and separates the two before Lino does any serious damage. The fight is over. Lino pumps her arms and jumps around the cage, her gum guard showing where her teeth should be.
Five seconds. Up until the penultimate fight of the night, when Boyd Allen breaks Leon Mynhardt’s nose and Mynhardt keeps fighting while spitting blood and cartilage all over the mat, himself and his opponent, Lino’s ferocious display is pretty much all anyone talks about. • To watch a video of Shana Power in training go to www.timeslive.co.za