Behind the scenes: The biggest fight for women’s MMA in Asia that never happened

It’s dawn on the 13th of March on Jalan Pudu, just on the outskirts of Kuala Lumpur’s silver-grey shopping and business district the Golden Triangle. The haze from Sumatra is beginning to fill the spaces between the buildings in this almost-metropolis.

Traffic outside the Swiss Garden Hotel breathes life into the bustle that makes the city. On the inside, the hotel’s transient lifeblood flows for the next few days with men and (two) women whose paycheques come at the grace of their willingness to be punched in the face for the viewing pleasure of Greater Asia.

I jump out of bed at about 7am to quell the persistent vibrations from my mobile phone. I’ve been asked to run an urgent errand requiring me to purchase magnesium salts.

The fighter I’ve been tasked to trail needs to topically dehydrate her skin with magnesium salts to shed more weight. It’s two hours from the weigh-ins and she’s slightly above the weight she’s been contracted to fight at. I oblige and dive into a cloud of morning traffic, smog and a lack of caffeine while the team prepares the tub she’s about to soak in.

It’s the 13th of March 2014 – one day before fighters from all over the world attempt to thrash the life out of each other, and the hype is palpable.

Sports desks have been abuzz with coverage and even The New York Times has dispatched a journo to these parts of the world to keep a finger on the pulse of the sizeable whirlwind surrounding what’s promised to be a “War of Nations”. In a little over 30 hours, South East Asia’s fastest-growing and most lucrative Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) organisation, ONE FC, will be broadcasting a showdown between fighters from different countries against each other in a circular cage.

With a broadcast reach to over 70 countries worldwide, one could say that the organisation’s rising stars will be fighting on the world stage by way of Stadium Negara in Kuala Lumpur.

***

PART I: Two girls, one cage

The world seems particularly interested in a grudge match between two girls – Ann Osman, a business development manager and fighter from Malaysia, and the other, Sherilyn Lim, a former advertising executive turned fighter from Singapore. In fact, the world is so interested that The New York Times has devoted its only coverage of the entire event to the two girls in a piece titled “Pioneers of Asian Women’s M.M.A. Step Into the Cage”.

The first time the two women squared off, things got controversial. Some said Osman should have won, others said Lim clearly won. The victory eventually went to Lim, with judges and fans divided on opinion.

For this next bout, Malaysia has a point to prove and Singapore is eager to tell her old rival where to stick it.

It almost seems like the value of ONE FC’s War of Nations, set to take place at the 10,000-seater Stadium Negara in Kuala Lumpur, teeters solely on this grudge match two female fighters in a predominantly male domain.

They’re also the reason why I am here – two girls, one cage and a lot of fanfare.

When Ann and Sherilyn first squared off in 2013, the fight perfectly ran the gamut of MMA possibilities. The two punched, kicked and grappled their way into the consciousness of Asian audiences. Unlike boxing, the rules of MMA do not require the referee to pause the fight if a fighter gets knocked down to the ground. Drop to the floor and you’ll get pounced on, till you fight your way back to your feet.

The first time the two went at each other, it was as real as it gets.

The genesis of the rivalry that was about to happen harkens back to September 2013 over the Causeway from where I’m seated today, the Singapore Indoor Stadium.

The girls got down to business quickly, going back and forth between striking and grappling, and the crowd was hooked. Ann, in particular, surprised spectators with her ability to rag doll Sherilyn while in a clinch.

Sherilyn, however, quickly found the Malaysian’s kryptonite – knees to Ann’s abdomen.

“She is breaking. Do you feel her breaking!?” Brad Robinson, one of Sherilyn’s training partners, yells at her during the interval between the first and second round.

“Look at me in the eyes. You have broken her. Keep those knees coming, it’s killing her.”

The second round starts with Sherilyn landing a few clean punches to Ann’s face, but before long, the two end up back in the clinch where things seem more or less balanced.

Then came more knees to Ann’s abdomen – ten hard knees, to be exact. Each one accompanied rhythmically by short roars from the crowd.

Singapore was on its feet, and behind Sherilyn’s knees. Brad seemed to be right. Ann looked like she was breaking.

MMA, fighters always have the option to shift the fight to a place more suited to his or her style, allowing Ann to take the fight to the ground where she could overpower Sherilyn. The fight then went to the third round with the balance of victory shifting back and forth throughout.

When the final buzzer sounded, the split decision victory went to Sherilyn.

And Singapore.

Despite the controversial victory that divided pundits and judges, a few things were clear: It was a victory for Women’s MMA in Asia, and there was going to be a rematch.

Before their match, the future for WMMA in Asia seemed bleak, but all this changed a year later when Sherilyn and Ann stood toe-to-toe in the cage for the first time.

Following their first bout, Sherilyn and Ann sent large blips through the radars of the MMA sphere. Filipino-based GMA Network wrote: “It is rare for two female fighters to steal the show on a night when two of the world’s best mixed martial artists were headlining the card, but that is exactly what Sherilyn Lim and Ann Osman did.”

The bout even managed to clinch second place in a worldwide poll in the coveted BloodyElbow.com WMMA Awards, coming in behind a fight featuring WMMA poster girl, Ronda Rousey.

The limp, amateur hour beginnings of female MMA in Asia were soon forgotten.

The New York Times hailed the two as pioneers of the sport in Asia. Time magazine was interested in how Ann balanced being professionally violent and being Muslim. Yahoo! News’ Singaporean desk painted a portrait of Sherilyn’s transformation from chubby, bullied teenager to hometown hero. Media outlets were constantly looking for ways to talk about the two. Sherilyn Lim and Ann Osman were WMMA’s salvation in Asia.

The rematch was going to be a big deal.

But it doesn’t happen.

***

PART II: A glimpse into Sherilyn’s world

I arrived two days before fight day and met up with Sherilyn and her team in the lobby of the hotel. Just a couple of hours before, she had sent me a few text messages with detailed instructions explaining how I could get in touch with her with the hotel’s wi-fi connection. Her efforts at being hospitable despite being in what I imagined to be a stressful situation hit me with a tinge of guilt.

When I finally met her in person, the guilt didn’t go away – Sherilyn is good at making the people around her feel at ease in spite of any circumstance, and she was going out of her way for me.

She had a couple of hours free in her schedule, so we left her teammates and moved things to her room which wasn’t housekept. Her bags lay open, clothes strewned across the floor. She apologised for the mess and crawled into bed while I opted to sit on a chair nearby. I faced her as she sat under a blanket. Audio recorder and notebook in-hand, it felt like I was taking her last will and testament.

I felt like an intruder. I really shouldn’t have been there.

***

PART III: The fucked-upness of a weight cut

The weight cut process is unarguably the hardest part of a fighter’s preparation for a fight. There were many intruders that day, considering the fighters were using common areas in the hotel for their last minute prep.

That meant shadowboxing under the scorching sun by the pool in a four-layer sweat suit, trying to shed a few pounds of water weight by way of perspiration while holidaymakers sipped from umbrella-ed mocktails just a few feet away.

Weight-cutting and weight classes make up what is essentially institutionalised cheating in the fight world.

A majority of fighters (including boxers) choose to fight at a weight class above their actual weight, and pull this off by shedding a drastic amount of body mass through dieting and dehydration until the official weigh-ins. The weigh-ins, where fighters take turns to step onto a scale in a room full of press and fans, happen slightly over 24 hours before the actual fight.

This means that the fighters have 24 hours from the time they step off the scale to put most of the weight back on. In other words, if you weigh a hefty 87kg on most days, you would probably fight at 77kg as a Welterweight fighter. The day after the weigh-ins, you would eat and drink your weight back to 87kg and step into the ring at that weight.

Putting the weight back on is the easy part. Losing a drastic amount of weight in a short period of time (usually about two to three weeks) requires a fighter to alter his or her nutritional intake by drastically limiting carbohydrates and sodium intake while continuing training intensely.

Once the fighter is close to the weight he or she needs to be at, the hardest part begins. As the human body is made up of approximately 60 per cent water, fighters usually turn to dehydrating themselves to shed the last few kilos. If perspiration through sessions in a sauna and shadow boxing with a four-layer sweat suit on and do not suffice, the last resort usually involves soaking a fighter in magnesium salts, which absorbs moisture from the body through the pores.

As one would imagine, dehydration requries an incredible amount of physiological and mental anguish on the person going through it.

Despite this, Sherilyn still welcomed me into her room and hospitably set the kettle on for me.

“Sherilyn is particularly driven because she feels like she is paving the way for other women.” Darren de Silva, head coach of Fight G

As we settled down for a chat, I asked how she felt.

“There was a small point towards the end of the last weight cut session where I really felt like shit,” she said, pained.

“I felt scared, my breathing was off and I really had to focus on the solution at hand… which was to make sure that I breathed in deep and slow because I could feel my heart rate going up. I felt a sense of panic… I felt it coming and I had to calm myself down because I couldn’t let myself break.”

At that point, I felt bad for having a bottle of water and a cup of coffee flanking me.

“I had to talk to myself, literally, talk to myself,” she continued, “I said to myself, ‘If this were a fight, what would you do? If this were a fight, you wouldn’t break, right? You would focus on fucking killing her, right? So what’s the difference now? This is not even the fight yet.’”

It’s been 12 hours since Sherilyn’s had anything to eat or drink, and she’s got 19 more to go until the weigh-ins where she can break her fast.

***

PART IV: Ferocity builds

I’m at the pool where Sherilyn’s second weight cut session is in full swing.

She’s starting to become a little colder. A little less friendly. A lot more focused.

“Sherilyn is particularly driven because she feels like she is paving the way for other women,” Darren de Silva, head coach of Fight G, told me as we sat by the pool, keeping an eye on Sherilyn.

“That’s one of the factors that drives her to perform in the cage.”

This, apparently, makes her easier to coach.

“Some fighters are one dimensional, or insistent on sticking to what they’re good at,” he continued. “Sherilyn’s not like that. She has good work ethic. She does what she’s told, and she learns fast. She’s like a sponge.”

I’m only paying half attention to what de Silva was saying because I observed that Sherilyn’s gears had shifted completely. She was no longer the professional people-pleaser I met in the lobby.

Five floors above the lobby, this Sherilyn looked like someone who only cared about hurting somebody. Her eyebrows stitched in perma-arch, eyes lit with focused aggression, locked onto an empty space that would soon be filled by one Ann Osman.

“Anger doesn’t work for me because it doesn’t last,” Sherilyn told me. “Aggression, on the other hand, keeps you on your toes.”

Sherilyn’s demeanour was exactly what it was when I first observed her training about a week earlier in Singapore.

This is no exaggeration. She was going at a grappling dummy that was almost as heavy as her with the focus of a lioness mauling at its prey, occasionally letting out unabashed growls.

Then fellow fighter Brad Robinson stepped into the ring, replacing the grappling dummy. He’s damn near twice her height and weight, but she took him on with the same intensity she gave the grappling dummy.

As Sherilyn shadowboxed that day in KL, I observed the empty space in front of her receiving the same treatment and respect.

***

PART V: No eye-gouging, no groin strikes, game on

After about an hour of shadowboxing, and laying under the sun and sauna sessions, she peeled the towels off her and we proceeded to the conference room for the official ONE FC rule briefing.

Opponents sat within close proximity of one another, all personnel in the room grouchy from the weight cut process. ONE FC veterans Andrew Leone and Peter Davis (who both went on to win their fights the next day) looked particularly tired.

I stood at the back of the room and observed former ONE FC head referee, now Vice-President of Operations, Matt Hume, running through the rules of the fight. No groin strikes, no eye-gouging, no strikes to the back of the head, or spine. Simple enough.

The briefing came to a close and the fighters had to hang around to sign a document declaring their acknowledgement of the rules, so naturally, some of the fighters were forced to mingle. Peter Davis managed. So did Ann Osman. By all appearances, Sherilyn had it all together pretty well too.

She greeted Ann’s team enthusiastically, and I heard the occasional heartfelt laughter that emerged from her side of the room. Her gear had shifted again, and Sherilyn was looking good. The Roger Sterling in her was back.

We’re 16 hours to the weigh-in and about 48 hours to the fight itself. Everything seemed to be going according to plan. But then again, a lot can happen in 48 hours.

***

PART VI: The phone rings. Impending disaster

I was awakened the following morning at 7am by a request over the phone to purchase more magnesium salts for Sherilyn.

I ran out onto the streets around 7:10am only to discover that the nearest pharmacy was 20 minutes away with traffic, and isn’t open till 8am – one hour from the weigh-in.

I returned to the hotel apologetic, and was immediately tasked to help fill the tub in coach Darren’s room with boiling water while Sherilyn and her teammates spent more time sweating in the sauna beside the pool.

The atmosphere in the room was frantic. We couldn’t fill the tub fast enough, so I ran down to my room and grabbed the kettle. On my way back to coach Darren’s room, I bumped into Andrew Leone in the lift, looking particularly sullen. His cheeks have sunken in from the dehydration, resembling a weathered meth addict on the verge of death. He, too, seemed to be struggling with making the weight.

***

PART VII: Worn out

Sherilyn barely made it back to her room when we realised that it was almost time for her to step on the weighing scale.

It was immediately apparent that the night hasn’t been too kind to her. She looked sullen. Her eyes glazed with fatigue and the colour in her skin has been exorcised and banished along with the water in her body.

I observed her team. It didn’t look hopeful. When Sherilyn stepped on the scale, it was announced in front of reporters that she was overweight by 3.1kg and will be given an hour to shed the excess weight.

Determined to take advantage of this second chance, we returned to the room where coach Darren tells Sherilyn to enter the tub of hot water, where the team had then dumped most of their supply of magnesium salts.

To keep this house of cards intact, coach Darren now had succumbed to this last resort – Sherilyn would attempt to dehydrate her skin by soaking in a hot saltwater bath. When she emerged from the scalding bath, the team had to wrap her in towels so that she perspires immediately.

“We need more towels,” Darren said with the coarse gravitas of an army sergeant who had been through several levels of hell. The demand for more towels gets passed through the chain of command from Darren, to strength and conditioning coach Ian Tan, to fellow team mate Allan Ng, and finally, to this lowly journalist, who made a dash down to the pool to ask for eight towels.

***

PART VIII: The house of cards collapses

For the first time in two days, I no longer felt like an intruder with eight towels in hand, dashing through the quiet corridors.

Having been given the responsibility of transporting some much needed towels to a fighter who needed to make weight urgently, I felt a mild sense of responsibility. Like I was minutely involved being in on the cusp of making something good happen. When I arrived at the door, however, it was apparent that the situation wasn’t hopeful at all. In fact, things were going to shit.

“I CAN’T FUCKING BREATHE,” was the first thing I heard when I arrived back at the room.

I stayed outside with towels under my arm as I heard Sherilyn (kicking, I imagine) and screaming.

The house of cards was collapsing.

Through the hotel room door, I could hear Sherilyn gasping for air. Perhaps the fighter who previously told her coach that she’d be willing to shave her head to make weight was finally at her physical breaking point.

Coach Darren decides to slap her to stop her from going into shock, which he succeeded in doing, but this elicited a murderous response that she had perhaps been saving for her opponent.

Her coaches pleaded with her to calm down, lest her condition worsened, but it seemed like Sherilyn’s mental resolve had collapsed under the weight of her physical condition. Perhaps the weight-cutting process was finally getting the better of her.

Prior to coming on this junket, I agreed to get out of the team’s way if the going got tough, fully aware of the toll fight prep can have on a fighter. I knocked the door, handed the towels to Darren, and waited outside. A tougher fight was happening between Sherilyn and herself, and her coaches were caught in the fray.

Even Roger Sterling’s Mad Men charm couldn’t have held up under the weight of his heart attack.

Sherilyn finally emerged from the room looking worse from ever and the walk to the weigh in venue wasn’t pretty either. Her coaches flanked her, supporting her almost-lifeless frame as she made her way to the room where Team Osman and ONE FC officials were waiting.

Like lambs being led to the slaughter house, Team Sherilyn looked despondent.

Coach Darren looked over to me and shook his head, signalling that she wasn’t going to make the weight. The team handed her off to a female reporter as men were told to leave the room since fighters usually remove as much clothing as possible to minimise excess weight. Before the door swung shut, I watched Sherilyn almost collapsing as the female reporter tried to support her on her way to the scale.

She stepped on the scale for the second time, but remained 2kg overweight. Team Sherilyn has seen better days.

***

PART IX: Why didn’t Sherilyn make weight?

When a fighter doesn’t “make weight”, the possibility of proceeding with a fight does remain on the cards, as long as the opponent approves of the circumstances.

If this happens, the overweight fighter surrenders a portion of his or her salary to the opponent as a penalty for not meeting the obligation. Conversely, the opponent can turn the fight down completely in response to the fighter’s failure to meet the terms of the agreement. Historically, both outcomes are common with high profile and low profile fighters.

Ann Osman decided around 5pm on the day of the weigh-ins that she did not want to proceed with the fight, citing a lack of professionalism.

Head coach of Juggernaut Fight Club, Arvind Lelwani, who has trained numerous fighters, feels that female fighters have a harder time cutting weight because their bodies go through bloating and water retention in their period cycles, causing irregular weight gain.

Some argue that heavier weight gives fighters an advantage, while others say that it usually does not make a difference because the weigh-ins happen the day before the fight, and fighters usually put the lost weight back anyway.

“Johnny Hendricks put on almost 30 pounds (13kg) between the weigh in and his title fight (against then-UFC Welterweight Champion George St. Pierre),” Don Carlo-Clauss, head MMA coach of Phuket Top Team, told me on the side.

In some cases, the fighters who weighed in heavier eventually go on to lose their fights.

Carlo-Clauss added: “Every fighter is different, so the amount of weight usually cut will vary depending on the fighter. Some fighters carry more body fat than others. Bigger fighters (heavyweights) can usually lose more weight than smaller fighters (flyweights).

“This is totally based on what is desirable or comfortable for each individual. I want my guys to be comfortable with whatever weight class they choose in order to have the best possible performance. Some people cut a lot. Some not much at all.”

***

PART X: What really happened to Sherilyn

Coach Ian sat with me at a cafe the day after as I attempted to make sense of what happened the day before.

As it turned out, Sherilyn had been battling with health issues throughout the fight camp, and the problems decided to sneak up on them just hours before the weigh-ins. She had been dealing with a small number of sporadic bouts of dizziness and blackouts that resulted in hospitalisation over the last three years. The most recent attack happened a few weeks before she was scheduled to fight and almost made a return the night before.

“A few weeks ago, she was hyperventilating, and then she lost sight and consciousness for awhile. We had to bring her to the hospital,” he explained.

“Yesterday, she started hyperventilating again, and seemed lightheaded and dizzy. She was going into that same zone that she went to before she passed out a few weeks ago. So for safety reasons, trying to be a responsible team, we decided (yesterday) that it was enough for the weight cut.

“It wasn’t worth risking the health of our fighter, so we decided stop (cutting weight) there.”

When Sherilyn was hospitalised, she was struggling harder than usual to finish a training session, but she pushed through. By the end of it, signs of trouble began to show.

“My whole body was numb. I couldn’t feel my face or my limbs. I took very short sharp breaths but I was struggling to breathe,” she explained.

Training partner Joshua Hong, who was training with her that day, said her eyes “rolled to the back of her head” and she entered a state of semi-consciousness. He added: “She was so out of it that when I accidentally slammed the door on her foot when Darren was carrying her out the door (to bring her to the hospital), she didn’t respond at all.”

At the hospital, Sherilyn remembers having needles “stuck in my body, an oxygen mask on but not much else”. When she regained consciousness, she asked to be discharged, but her doctor insisted on keeping her under observation due to an inconsistency in her heart rate.

“I didn’t want to stay, but Darren told the doctor about my history with these sorts of attacks, so the doctor insisted that I stay. I eventually had to see a heart specialist, who told me that it was possible that the walls of my heart may be thickening, making it harder for it to pump blood, which is common among athletes,” Sherilyn added.

Sherilyn rested for a few days before returning back to training. There was a second attack two weeks after the hospitalisation. The second time it has happened in 2014.

***

PART XI: No excuses

Not making weight is perhaps one of the biggest taboos in the fight world, next to getting caught for using performance-enhancing drugs.

Just a day after Sherilyn failed to make weight, ONE FC’s head honcho told MMA Insider: “Sherilyn has been very unprofessional as a fighter and is a great disappointment to us.

“Our fighters have two jobs: make weight and fight. Her refusal to make weight has just cost her the biggest fight of her life.”

“In this industry, you either make weight or you don’t. It doesn’t matter why, or how. I could’ve done better.”Sherilyn Lim

Her opponent Ann Osman took to social media shortly after and said: “I have sacrificed a lot for weeks, goin’ through all the blood and pain till the last hour and I was FULL on ready to fight! Unfortunately it was all hampered and a waste of time as my opponent did not act professionally at the last hour and put in the work needed.”

Even though a large portion of the details behind her failure to make weight was left buried under waves of criticism, Sherilyn remained stoic and made no excuses.

“As a fighter, we all have the professional obligation to make weight. There were many things I could’ve done better, and I make no excuses for myself. Ann had every right to refuse the fight. It’s a matter of principle. It’s a matter of professionalism.

“In this industry, you either make weight or you don’t. It doesn’t matter why, or how. I could’ve done better,” she tells me a few weeks later.

***

PART XII: The road to redemption

The night she failed to make weight, her team coaxed her out for drinks to cheer her up.

Coach Darren’s priorities had shifted – he felt it was time to move on, and was doing everything in his power to help the team get over the road bump. His fighters are family to him, so his objective that night was to lighten the mood.

When I arrived, Sherilyn was reluctant to be there and she revealed that she’s thankful for some sober company.

“I’ve made a huge mistake, but I’m only failing if I give up completely. But I’m not done with it yet.”Sherilyn Lim

She clearly wasn’t in the mood for merrymaking and I was giving her an excuse to keep to herself. Having to deal with being bullied and ostracised as a child, then finding success in numerous ways through tumultuous conditions, it was clear that while she wasn’t in the mood for world domination, her resilience will see her rise again.

“I can only keep training. Trying to be normal. There may be a black mark on my reputation, and it’s just something I have to deal with,” she said, as she opened up.

“I know I’m supposed to move forward, and that’s the only thing I know how to do,” telling me from a balcony overlooking other revelers below on a crowded KL street.

“There’s always going to be one person in the world who’s going to be against you, and that’s life, regardless of what you do for a living. If anything, I’ve realised that I’m really not done with this yet and I’m not willing to give up yet.

“I’ve made a huge mistake, but I’m only failing if I give up completely. But I’m not done with it yet.”

While the weight cut debacle in KL may have pulled the fighter’s career into hot water, it still doesn’t seem heavy enough to obscure the fact that that Sherilyn’s first square-off with Ann Osman made history and put Women’s MMA in Asia on the map. Will we see a return?

According to Coach Darren, there is hope.

“Some people do one or two fights, and then they retire. She’s not one of those people. She’s not a quitter.”

Tags: Ann Osman, Featured, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, Mixed Martial Arts, MMA, One FC, Sherilyn Lim, WMMA