ARAYA’S BED IN Albuquerque is covered with more than a dozen stuffed animals, and she has a name for every one. She has carefully placed the Hello Kitties, the snowman, the tiger and the puppy dog around her as she prepares to talk about the time the blood came pouring out of her mother’s nose when Rose Namajunas put her into a rear naked choke in 2017.
Araya had just turned 6 when Waterson lost that fight. But while the blood pouring onto the mat might have bothered an adult, it didn’t really bother Araya as much as the massive black eye her mother suffered when she was 3. “I get sad,” Araya says. “Especially when she gets black eyes and stuff.”
She’s referring to the atomweight title fight Waterson lost to Herica Tiburcio in 2014. In the greenroom following Waterson’s defeat, Araya cried as her mother held her tight. “Hey, baby,” Waterson told her. “I’m OK.” In video captured by the documentary Fight Mom, Waterson’s eye is swollen shut and half her face is bruised. But Waterson calmly tells Araya, “Mommy just has to go back and work on what I didn’t work on and get better.”
Waterson says it’s in those moments that she explains to Araya, “This is Mommy’s job and this is what I signed up for. I know what I’m getting into when I go in there.” There have been times, she says, “when I told her Mommy’s hurting and that it sucks to lose. And that it makes me sad, it makes me angry, and it’s OK to have those feelings.”
“She’s part of my journey,” Waterson says of her decision to let Araya watch all her fights. “I’ve always believed that you learn so much more through somebody’s actions, and I can only tell her so much. I would rather her experience it. It’s her journey as much as it is mine.”
Waterson then tackles the question of how she plans to raise her daughter surrounded by a sport that’s been criticized for objectifying women. “I raise her the only way I know how: to be confident in who she is. And I do that through example.”
She acknowledges that she gets some grief about her name and her past. “If people are going to tune in because my fight name is the Karate Hottie or because I used to work at Hooters, then so be it,” she says. “I just need your eyes to watch, and once you see that I am a true martial artist, then I’ll change your mind about how you view me.”
Waterson then laughs her addictive laugh and asks, “Who doesn’t want to be the hot mom?”
Waterson, who defeated Cortney Casey in her last UFC Fight Night appearance in April 2018, will face Karolina Kowalkiewicz on March 30, 2019. Josh Hedges/Zuffa LLC/Getty Images
THE COMBINATION OF that attitude and Waterson’s fighting style eventually caught the attention of Dana White. “Waterson was a no-brainer,” he says of his decision to sign her in 2015. “She’s a very well-rounded fighter. Her striking, kicking, submissions, she has it all. And I always look for that ‘it’ factor in a fighter. If you have that extra little oomph, that ‘it’ factor, it doesn’t hurt. And she’s got it in truckloads.”
Out of the 585 fighters in the UFC, about 90 are women. Only five other mothers have cracked the top 10, according to the UFC: bantamweights Cat Zingano, Sara McMann, Marion Reneau and Yana Kunitskaya, and flyweight Alexis Davis. Waterson is the only competitor in the lightest division, the 115-pound strawweight division, to make the top 10.
“Being a fighter is a completely selfish sport. Being a mother is completely selfless,” Waterson explains. “You can’t just come home after a hard day of training and forget about it. The fight’s still there. And then Araya has homework, and in those moments I can’t be this harsh fighter. I have to be this nurturing mother that she needs.”
Holm marvels at how Waterson does it, especially during intense training camp sessions leading up to a big fight. “I know how much effort it takes, how much discipline it takes,” she says. “I know how much I have to put everything else out of my life in order to have a good training camp. I don’t know if I could do that if I had a child as well.”
Araya knows life changes when training camp starts. “I have to train,” her mother tells her. “She says that,” Araya explains. “‘I have to work hard.’ She says that too. ‘I have to not be messing around.’ ‘I have to focus on what I’m doing.’ Stuff like that!”
Waterson says there are days when she simply cannot get up from the couch after a hard workout session, so her mother will often fly in for a month to cook, clean and help Gomez look after Araya. It makes Gomez philosophical: “Being able to put your ego aside when it’s necessary with your family, your wife, your daughter, it’s extremely necessary, right? I’ve gotten my nails painted, I’ve gotten lipstick, I’ve gotten all sorts of craziness, but being a man makes you do things that you would think are weak and they’re not. It’s harder.”
Waterson says there was stigma around women who get pregnant and start families while training in MMA, judgment she initially feared. Caitlin O’Hara for ESPN
IT’S THE DAY of UFC 229, and Waterson and Gomez are worried about Araya’s safety. Gomez has heard rumors for weeks about bad blood between the Irish and the Russians potentially spilling out into the stands during the McGregor-Khabib fight. As her training partner, Gomez will be with Waterson in the hours leading up to the fight. Waterson’s mother and sister will be watching over Araya, but Gomez worries about their safety too. Now that they’re in Las Vegas and can already feel the tension vibrating throughout the casinos, they’re thinking, for the very first time, they may not let Araya sit in the stands.
When the head of UFC’s security learns of their concerns, he tells Gomez a member of the security team can shadow Araya until she rejoins her parents following Waterson’s fight. When they realize Araya is listening to their discussion as they talk in the arena, the two men shift into the coded language all parents know as they make plans for what to do with her if her mother is so badly injured that she needs to go to the hospital. They never actually say “hurt” or “hospital,” so Araya remains oblivious to the discussion that’s going on over her head, literally. But all the adults suddenly feel the gravity of what could happen that night.
So there Araya is, screaming her head off in the stands, when her mother enters the arena. But the woman who emerges from the tunnel is almost a total stranger. Gone is the addictive laugh and the contagious smile. Gone is the woman who told her to brush her teeth and clean her room. This woman is ferocious, with a locked jaw declaring to the world she’s ready to demolish anyone who dares get in her way. And Araya loves every minute of it.
Araya’s recitation of what happens next is frighteningly accurate. “Once the fight began, my mommy threw some punches and then she took her down for a little bit and then the round stopped,” Araya says. “And then she went to the second round and she took her down right away. But then, little problems, and she hopped back up and threw more punches. Then she took her back down, came back up, ding, ding, ding. And then the third round she took her down first thing and she spent the whole time on the ground. And then ding, ding, ding, she won!”
When Joe Rogan starts interviewing her mother inside the Octagon right after the fight, Araya becomes unusually quiet. With her eyes riveted on her mother, Araya listens as an emotional Waterson tells the world something she’d been thinking about for years but has never said publicly before: “I want to be the first UFC champ that’s a mom.”
“That made me feel special,” Araya would later say with a huge smile.
Security then whisks the 7-year-old backstage before the giant brawl that’d been simmering between the McGregor and Khabib camps finally erupts in the arena. As subsequent fights spill onto the sidewalks outside the arena, Araya remains happily unaware, eating ice cream in the greenroom as she celebrates her mother’s victory.
WATERSON IS NOW ranked No. 9 in the strawweight division. She knows she has only a couple of good years left, and her goal of becoming the first champion mother is a difficult one. Her next fight is March 30 against former title challenger Karolina Kowalkiewicz. White says Waterson has to win the Kowalkiewicz fight and several others if she wants a shot at the title.
What does Araya think? Well, she wants a career in gymnastics. But the UFC is growing on her; she says her mother grew up a fighter “and I think it would be cool to finally feel how it really is.”
Her mother says Araya can be whatever she wants to be. “I want her to be confident in herself. I want her to be brave in scary situations. I want her to be happy.” As for Waterson, she says Araya has made her into the very best version of herself. “I love the fact that I’ve transformed my body into a killing machine,” Waterson says. “That I can protect my daughter. That I can nurture her. That I can be all those things.”