Sara McMann mötte Ronda Rousey i en titelmatch under UFC 170 för snart ett år sedan och förlorade då via knockout i första ronden. Nu berättar hon att matchen handlade om mycket mer än att titeln, då det var det som skulle få hennes cancersjuka pappa att till slut acceptera cellgiftsbehandlingen som ledde till att han överlevde sin sjukdom.
Det här berättar hon om det, via ”MMAFighting”:
He chose not to do chemotherapy, so he was just choosing that he was going to live with the cancer until it killed him…and the cancer that had come back was very aggressive.
He’d gone months of deciding that he wasn’t going to go through chemotherapy and he wasn’t going to live. The fight happened, and it was basically presented to me as, if you don’t take this fight you may never get a chance to fight Ronda, that she may go into movies and this might be the only opportunity. I was really struggling with it, because I hadn’t been training. Things were really hard for me emotionally. I’m a huge daddy’s girl, so it was really hard for me.
But when I accepted the fight, he was the first person I told about it. And he decided (because of the title fight), he was going to go through chemotherapy because he didn’t want to die before he got to see me fight.
We had hospice nurses coming to our house. Every time that I drove up there I was very aware that that was the last time that I was probably going to see my dad. He cut it so unbelievably close to death that it’s ridiculous.
McMann mötte senast Lauren Murphy under UFC Fight Night 47 i augusti, då hon vann via domslut. Hon kommer nu härnäst att möta Miesha Tate under UFC 183 i slutet av januari.
