Advertisement

Inside Kayla Harrison's journey from Olympic gold medalist to MMA's next hope

[jwplayer vA5qGyqL-RbnemIYZ]

(This story first appeared on For The Win, a fellow USA TODAY Sports site.)

CHICAGO — Wearing a pair of flip-flops, Kayla Harrison hops over puddles as rain flits down onto State Street and the men and women making their Friday morning commute. About 13 hours earlier, Harrison had been down the street, locked in a cage at the Chicago Theatre, taking on her first MMA opponent.

She has a small cut on her lip, but it’s hardly noticeable as she sips her iced coffee. Not that anything about her is noticeable to the people in this Starbucks; she’s fit, yes, and wearing MMA gear, but nobody stops to look at her. She’s an Olympic gold medalist who broke barriers for her country, but that has only ever lent her minimal celebrity. And her MMA career is in its infancy. She moves without interruption, grappling with a thought she is only beginning to understand: when she won that first fight, quickly and cleanly, she finally found herself again.

Part of it is this: She didn’t even realize how lost she’d become. Harrison is the greatest American judo player to ever put on a gi, and no one else is even close. She became the first American to win gold in judo at the 2012 London Olympics — and did so after bravely coming forward with the horrific details of her sexual abuse at the hands of a coach. In 2016, she won all four Olympic matches by an ippon, or a stoppage, to win her second gold. She announced her retirement at her post-gold press conference, went home to Boston and did the traditional things Olympic gold medalists do after winning gold. She went to awards shows and made appearances on the TV shows “Flea Market Flip” and “Impractical Jokers.”

But at some point, opportunities run out for nearly all Olympians. Harrison had been practicing judo since she was 6. Her whole life had been focused on this one goal, and she attained it.

Anxiety started the night she won gold in Rio. She couldn’t sleep. She couldn’t stop worrying about what to do next. When she didn’t have an answer, depression set in. Back home in Boston she would lay in bed all day, watching television. Part of being an elite athlete is continuing to train when others would quit; it’s fighting through the urges to move on to an easier and more relaxed life. But Harrison found, as so many others have, the arrival of her normal life unexpectedly jarring.

“I imagine it’s what it’s like when kids leave for college. What do I do with my life? Who am I? Where do I go? I was going through a lot of soul-searching moments,” Harrison said.

Any combat athlete who competes at a high level is eventually asked about MMA. For Harrison, those questions were more incessant not just because of her skill level but because of who had jumped from judo to MMA before her: Ronda Rousey won bronze at the 2008 Olympics before becoming the UFC’s first female champion. Rousey and Harrison trained together at Pedro’s Judo Center, in Boston, for three years. When Harrison first started training there -Rousey was the top athlete, the person she constantly wanted to keep pace with.

Kayla Harrison

“I wanted to be her. I’ve always had that Ronda complex, like anything she can do I can do better,” Harrison said.

With Rousey’s shadow looming, Harrison was asked if she would try MMA in the same press conference where she announced her retirement, but she wasn’t ready to say yes then. After the Olympics, she had no idea what she really wanted to do, but the fear of not trying it won out.

“I knew I didn’t want my athletic career to be over. I knew that if I didn’t give MMA a shot, I would always wonder. I would always have those what-ifs,” she said. “I can’t live my life like that. I could never spend the rest of my life wondering.”

* * * *

First, Harrison had to convince Jim Pedro Sr. that she was serious about trying MMA. Pedro has been involved in judo in the U.S. for decades, first as an athlete, then a coach. He speaks with a thick Boston accent, and always directly: He refuses to woo promising athletes to his gym because he feels it will make them soft.

“I don’t believe in letting them be egotistical, and then you kiss their butt because you want to be their coach,” he told me. “You know what, you either do it, or you go home.”

But for Harrison, he is more than just the hard-driving, old-school coach he presents himself as. Pedro Sr., or Big Jim, as Harrison refers to him, along with his son, Jimmy Pedro Jr., helped Harrison somehow find a way to continue her high-level judo career after an ex-coach, Daniel Doyle, sexually abused Harrison for three years starting when she was 13. He was sentenced to 10 years in jail in 2007.

When news of the Jerry Sandusky case broke at Penn State prior to the 2012 Olympics, Harrison decided she could no longer be silent and shared her story with USA TODAY.

She wanted to use her story to try and warn parents and kids about how to recognize signs of danger in relationships between adults and children. She worked with a psychiatrist and clinical psychologist from Harvard Medical School to write “Fighting Back: What an Olympic Champion’s Story Can Teach Us about Recognizing and Preventing Child Sexual Abuse — and Helping Kids Recover.”

“I feel like we have a big gap in terms of education in sexual abuse. In health class, they talk about stranger danger and they talk about safe sex and they talk about saying no to drugs, but you don’t learn what you should do when someone close to you tries to take advantage of you,” Harrison said. “It’s a tricky subject to approach, and a difficult thing to talk about, especially when the person is an adult and has power over you.”

Shattered by Doyle’s abuse, Harrison moved 868 miles from Ohio to Boston to work with Pedro.

Kayla Harrison

The bond between the Pedros and Harrison is strong. They refer to each other as family. Big Jim was unsure about Harrison trying MMA because he looks at her like a daughter, and he doesn’t want to see his daughter get punched in the face.

As many fathers would do, though, he still supported her when she proved this was what she really wanted. It started at the scale. Harrison competed in judo at 78 kg (171 lbs.) But featherweight, or 145 lbs., is the largest weight class offered by the UFC for women.

While competing in judo, nutrition was rarely a concern of Harrison’s. She would eat 6,000 calories a day. She won the semifinals of a tournament in Japan, got a Big Mac from McDonald’s, and then won the finals. Working out was never an issue for her, but getting her nutrition under control was.

Harrison started eating better, training more, slimming down. Pedro Sr. notices details like that. She was a “little bit thinner, a little bit thinner” and that was enough for him.

He launched into helping his star pupil make a new career. He sat in on sparring sessions, and flew around the country with Harrison as she tried to find the right MMA training camp. He advised her on choosing a promotion to start her career.

Though they were transitioning to a new sport, he felt he’d been here before. After winning gold in London, Harrison wasn’t sure if she wanted to continue to compete in judo. Pedro is unwilling to coax motivation from charges, but he waited nonetheless for the moment he suspected would come: Harrison decided she needed to prove her first gold was not a fluke.

This time, his task would be to help her find the right help. She tried several MMA gyms before walking into American Top Team in Coconut Creek, Florida. She knew right then it was the right place to teach her and challenge her as she made the jump, and Big Jim could stay involved in her training.

The year spent learning a new sport was downright terrifying at times. Harrison posted a video of herself on Instagram in February, showing her struggle to keep her composure during a training session.

* * * *

Even as she prepared for her final Olympics, everything felt like a grind: Practice, traveling all over the world, even winning. MMA training broke the routine, sent her reeling. Her first sparring session had, for her, the intensity of a judo tournament.

“The good thing about me is that I can take a hit and that I’m not afraid. Well, I am afraid. I’m not going to lie to you. You’re always a little bit scared when they lock that door behind you, but the fear doesn’t override the desire to come out on top,” Harrison said.

That feeling never dissipated. If anything, it intensified. A week out from the fight, I ask her if she’s nervous.

“Oh yeah! Are you kidding me? I’m a walking bomb right now. Everyone is walking on eggshells around me. I’m a little bit of a psychopath at the moment. It just feels like the Olympics again,” she said. “I know I’ve done everything right because I’m at that point where I’m like, [expletive] training. [Expletive] talking about it. I just want to fight.”

It has been a year since she started training and Harrison is finally in Chicago for her professional debut. She ended up signing with Pro Fight League, a promotion just below the UFC without a fully developed women’s division. Fight weeks are always a drawn-out process, with lots of events for fighters to meet media and fans, but Harrison’s days are particularly intense. Her background — as a crusader against child abuse, Olympic gold medalist and friend of Ronda — has PFL poised to build around her … if she can capture fans’ attention (and win, of course). It starts in an alley next to a theater with mats set up below a marquee advertising a concert by Broadway stars.

Kayla Harrison

With media and about 50 fans gathered around, Harrison threw her boyfriend, UFC fighter Tony Martin, a few times before she got bored, and wanted to try something different. The PFL had bussed in kids from the Crushers Club, a boxing team from Englewood, one of Chicago’s roughest areas, to watch the open workouts. They had shadow-boxed for the crowd as Harrison was being pulled from interview to interview.

She saw the kids standing there, watching her, and said, “Do you guys want to learn how to throw somebody?”

What kid will say no to that?

About 10 kids lined up as Harrison used Martin as a training dummy. She took each one through the steps of a judo throw. Martin was game, and happily stood up after each throw. Harrison stepped in a few times and let some of the smaller competitors throw her. Harrison’s big, charismatic smile broke free.

Harrison engages with children like this whenever she can, because she knows better than anyone should how vulnerable they are.

“There’s a lot of kids that are watching me, and it’s cool to watch people throw someone, but when I was a kid, I wanted to learn how to throw people!” she said. “Maybe I just got someone else started in judo. Maybe I changed someone’s life. That’s the goal.”

Everything about MMA is new to her. When she weighed in for judo tournaments, it was simply Harrison, a person with a clipboard, and a scale. In MMA, weighing in is an all-day affair. In the morning the day before her fight, she weighed in for state commission officials. In the afternoon, the Pro Fight League hosted a “weigh-in” for fans and media, where each fighter steps on a scale that’s not plugged in, flexes and faces off with his or her opponent.

In between the early weigh-ins and the fan event, she paced around her hotel room. She’s not sure what to wear, if she should put on makeup or what she should do with her hands. Her coaches encourage her to use the moment to talk trash to her opponent, Brittney Elkin.

“I’m not a good trash talker. I’m not good under pressure like that. I’m gonna mess it up,” Harrison said.

Kayla Harrison and Brittney Elkin

When the moment came, Harrison stood on the scale wearing a sports bra that read “Fearless.” During their face-off, Elkin put up her fists in a fight pose. Harrison did the same, but didn’t quite get her hands into the position where they should be for a fight. Her coaches got a good laugh out of it, and Harrison slugged through one more ritual in an MMA week.

Harrison’s last judo match was at the Olympics on August 11, 2016. On June 21, 2018, she finally got a chance to compete again, but there was another MMA ritual to get through. Fighters choose their own walkout songs, and they usually give us a tiny peek into the mind of a fighter. Rousey used “Bad Reputation” by Joan Jett. Elkin walked out to her fight with Harrison using Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing In The Name Of.”

Harrison walked out to Carrie Underwood’s “Champion.”

“I didn’t pick it until that day. It’s a really good song, and I love it a lot, and I love country music, plus it’s got Ludacris in it so it’s a little bit of rap, but it’s a little corny,” Harrison said. “I was like, no, I need to be edgy. I’m edgy now! This is the new Kayla! I’m not a golden girl anymore! I’m a badass! But I’m not.”

Badass or not, Harrison got the job done in her first fight. She took a punch in the mouth early on, but was able to control Elkin with an inside trip. From there, she landed a few punches from the top, and then turned to her judo. She caught Elkin’s arm, stretched her out into an arm bar, and submitted her at 3:18 in the first round.

So 22 months after winning a gold medal in judo, Harrison was a winner in her first MMA fight. Pro Fight League officials Carlos Silva and Ray Sefo couldn’t hide their grins when talking about her fight. It had aired on NBC Sports Network. She looked calm and focused throughout her bout, and it was the kind of win that could only signal good things for her and the PFL.

“What happened is what I expected to happen, but like she said so herself, she felt the nerves, she felt the pressure of who she is as a two-time Olympic champion. Although that was her first time in the cage, it was one of those things where she’s comfortable wearing the gi, and she’s comfortable being a judo practitioner,” Sefo said. “But today was kind of a reality check for her. All in all, what happened was what I expected to happen. I’ve held pads for her. She’s a freak of nature, the way she puts combinations together.”

Harrison’s adrenaline was still flowing after the fight.

“Man what, a rush! Have you ever stepped in a cage and let them lock the door behind you? I highly recommend it,” Harrison said to media after the fight.

While she pointed out things she still needed to work on in her fight game, and talked about all the mistakes she made on the way to a win in less than four minutes, there was one statement that really stuck out in her post-fight press conference.

“That’s the most alive I’ve felt since 2016. That’s the most Kayla I’ve felt in a long, long time. It was absolutely worth it,” Harrison said.

When we met the next morning, I pointed out to her that depression isn’t always about feeling sad, but about not feeling like you. Something about MMA made her feel like Kayla again.

“Oh my God. You hit the nail on the head,” she said. “I’m not sad about anything, but I just don’t feel myself. I feel like this is a beginning! This is the beginning of a really exciting new journey. It took so long, but it happened so fast at the same time. I feel like I’m going to be processing it for a while. I’m really excited. I can’t wait to fight again. I was really scared. I’m not going to lie. I was scared. What if you suck? What if you can’t take a punch? What if you freeze?”

She walked into that cage and let them lock the gate behind her. She took a punch. Harrison may have the skills to become one of the best MMA fighters of all time. It’s possible she could fizzle out, too.

She’ll know, at least, what it feels like to try. And that, after months of wandering and wondering, is enough.

For more on PFL 2, check out the MMA Events section of the site.

Longtime sports and MMA reporter/radio host Maggie Hendricks is on staff at USA TODAY Sports and is a contributor to For The Win. Follow her on Twitter at @maggiehendricks.

Be sure to visit the MMA Junkie Instagram page and YouTube channel to discuss this and more content with fans of mixed martial arts.

More News