Deanna Cioppa 9y

Welcome To The UFC Big Time, Paige VanZant

MMA

Three days before Paige VanZant's second UFC fight, the strawweight with model looks and Dana White-bestowed It Factor sits straight-backed, hands on knees, almost prim, in the green room of a Manhattan broadcast news station.

With her short, flower-print dress, golden hair and wide, pink-lipsticked smile, she looks even younger than her 21 years -- more student council president than 115-pound bruiser. She answers questions about her training habits, the future of MMA in New York, where the sport is still illegal, and the impact of women's combat fighting on gender expectations for young girls.

Throughout the conversation, VanZant is eager, but a little rehearsed. There's a lot of rote stuff about the emotional nature of female fighters and about breaking down barriers. It's a little interview-round-at-the-pageant, though she uses a great phrase to describe why MMA should be legalized in New York. "Violent but voluntary," she calls it.

Even seconds before her showdown with Felice Herrig, nine years her senior, on Saturday night, VanZant is all toothy smiles, bouncy enthusiasm and pink fingernails.

It's that kind of image that has had many critics wondering just what the hell this young thing with a grand total of five pro fights is doing scooping up Reebok endorsements and taking on veterans -- getting a prime-time slot on a Fox card only raised eyebrows more.

Then she went and doled out a beating on Herrig that few saw coming, an assault in which the sheer volume of blows seems mathematically impossible (FightMetric put the number of her strikes at 241 to Herrig's 67).

As the horn sounded to end the fight, VanZant, on her knees, seemed to burst into tears, then got up and staggered into the outstretched arms of her cornermen. She barely pulled herself together to accept the official victory.

What the camera angle doesn't pick up, however, is that VanZant was already crying 10 seconds before the horn sounded, even as she ground Herrig into the mat. Perhaps even more than the remarkable strike tally, those tears told the world that Paige VanZant, for all her bubbliness, is dead serious about her burgeoning UFC career.

"It was such a huge trial for me," she said a couple days later, on the phone from Sacramento. "It was a huge moment to fight someone like Felice Herrig and pull off such a win. I couldn't believe I had done it."

In those last 10 seconds, the valve that had for weeks been straining to contain a roiling sea of nerves finally blew. All that prefight wide-eyed enthusiasm had concealed mounting, self-imposed pressure that during her last week in camp was just as likely to manifest as tears as it was ecstasy. Which is understandable, given that she's a 21-year-old being paid to hang out on the business end of a whole lot of violence, in front of millions of people.

But for VanZant, the beatings and the armchair critics pale in comparison to the doubt that stems from being so young, with so much space to grow -- the frustration, in other words, of her own potential. "It's like I go back and forth between [thinking] 'I'm meant for this,' to being so nervous, shaking," she said, "like 'I can't believe I'm doing this! Why would I ever put myself in this position?'"

Reading between the lines of her prefight interviews, you get the sense she's straining at the bit, desperate to speed up time until she's capable of fulfilling every ounce of promise. It's hard to tell if it helps or hurts, then, that White, the UFC president, compared her to phenom Conor McGregor, whose meteoric rise in the UFC has been one of the stories of the year.

"It's almost like the Conor McGregor thing," White said. "The guy bursts out of nowhere, explodes onto the scene and backs it up. And Paige VanZant did tonight, too. She looked unbelievable. And she is. She's one of those people that has that thing ...

"She's got that thing that I always talk about -- that thing you can't teach. Everybody in my dressing room tonight wanted to meet her. They were like, 'We want to meet Paige VanZant.' She's got that thing man. And she can fight."

As a young fighter, though, VanZant is daily, often painfully, reminded at the hands of her trainers and training partners, mostly men, of how far she has yet to go. It's especially chafing given her natural and outsized competitive drive.

"I hate to lose more than I like to win," she said, "so I don't want to ever put myself in a position where I'm going to have to deal with the grief of losing."

For now, there's no need to grieve, and the talented young fighter is looking to come off her latest triumph in a very 21-year-old manner: a much-needed trip back home to Sparks, Nevada, and a vacation with her mom.

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