For a lot of MMA fans, especially in the UFC, they didn't know who I was... unless you're really involved in women's MMA.
I love MMA. I will be involved in some capacity, or in various capacities within the sport, after my fighting career is over.
I never got into MMA to be famous, I got into it to compete and pursue athletic aspirations. They were my pure intentions. I came from a true sport, an Olympic background, winning multiple national, international and Olympic medals. So I entered MMA as a sport.
A lot of people like to think that golf is a lazy man's sport. Or it's a rich man's sport, or it's a sport that they can't be involved in.
What got me into MMA first was that I was a wrestler, and I was a gangbanger getting into trouble a lot and getting into fights. I grew up in a family of 15 in a four-bedroom house. It was dysfunctional, so that alone made me want to be an MMA fighter. It's really the only sport where you gotta basically depend on yourself.
My staged work looks so real that people actually take it for documentary. But, in fact, that is my intention, to disguise the manufacturedness of it. Half of my work, or probably more than that, is staged.
By continually increasing the difficulty of the sport, we are discouraging younger athletes from starting and continuing in the sport. But most importantly, we are losing the beauty of our sport. We do not want gymnastics to lose what makes it so great - its artistic beauty.
The people who critique me are the people who don't know about the sport. They don't really know about the rules of MMA. They aren't a real fan or follower of the sport, or they're just people who like to talk.
I started training for MMA when I was 18 years old. My jujitsu coach told me, 'Amanda, you should try MMA.' Since that moment, I got in love with this sport and haven't stopped.
In this sport, the good thing about the UFC and MMA in general is a lot of it's based on perception.
Difference between Partition experience of Punjabis and Sindhis is that Punjabis found their state in India while Sindhis lost theirs.
Of course to be a legend of the sport you have to truly have to have a love for MMA. You can be successful in MMA without having that love.
I practice the martial arts. I don't practice MMA. MMA is my job, MMA is a new sport. Martial arts is the knowledge from the ages.
You can tell MMA is a carb sport because it's fast; it's explosive. It's not a fat storage sport.
I really don't look at it as a real sport because anybody can come into MMA and learn that. You can learn that.
There are a lot of sports that New Zealand does very well but MMA is a truly global sport and it's practiced in the farthest reaches of this earth.