Sara McMann’s Title Fight Against Rousey Helped Save Her Father’s Life
Almost a year ago, Sara McMann stepped into the Octagon to face Ronda Rousey for the UFC women’s bantamweight title.
McMann lost the bout via TKO after being kneed in the body and the fight was stopped. While the fight was a controversial stoppage in the eyes of many, it helped her father beat cancer.
She spoke on The MMA Hour:
“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.”
Despite McMann losing to Rousey, this story has an incredibly happy ending! McMann’s father is currently in remission, and according to McMann, he responded very well to chemotherapy.
Topics:
UFC NEWS
