Ireland’s pink panther

SHE has an idea what you probably think, about her, about her sport.

Mixed Martial Arts and cage fighting is “nearly this criminal activity” in which “thugs and scumbags” pummel each other, and any woman that engages in it must be “masculine and ugly and very aggressive” because it’s something that real women wouldn’t do. The former US presidential candidate John McCain once described MMA as “human cock-fighting”.

Even the sport’s biggest operator, the UFC, won’t facilitate female fights. So since she craves them, will travel anywhere in the world to have one, with her wild, pink, punk hair, that must make her some kind of freak.

If Aisling Daly were to add another tattoo though to her already decorative and toned 5’2’’ frame, it should probably be the quote Dan Shanahan popularised: If You Don’t Know Me, Don’t Judge Me.

Probably the best way to describe the 23-year-old fireball of energy is that if you’ve only ever seen her in the ring, you’d have no idea how smart and pleasant and petite she is, just as if you’ve only ever seen her outside the ring and cage you’d have no idea how downright vicious she and her sport can be. Outside the cage, she’s a dote. In it, she’s a killer.

We meet at the entrance of the Straight Blast Gym on the Long Mile Road, just up the street from her parents’ home in Drimnagh where she still lives with them. The gym is her other home, though she also calls it her workplace, and with good reason, because any week she hasn’t a fight she’s working out here twice a day, six days a week.

Just a few metres beyond the entrance door and on the verge of the gym floor is a sign in big, bold letters: NO SHOES OR EGOS BEYOND THIS POINT.

John Fogarty, the head coach, is insistent upon that. Over the years Daly has seen a good few egos try their luck only for Fogarty to unapologetically show them the door.

“Some people would come in trying to hurt people,” she explains.

“They’re no good to the team we have here because it’s not fair, it’s not smart. We’re all here to learn and if you’re going around hurting people it means that you’re taking them off the mats and stopping them from improving. You can still throw lots of strikes but throw them fast and light so the other person knows they’re under pressure. There’s no need to hurt them.”

In competition, in that ring or cage, it’s another matter entirely.

Take her Cage Warrior fight against Molly Helsel, the American, in the Neptune Stadium 12 months ago. Daly and Helsel emerge out of their corners for the third and final round and at first it seems as if they’re just boxing; shadowing, feinting, then jabbing one another. Suddenly a couple of kicks are thrown before Day is bulldozing Helsel into the cage netting. They grapple, then Daly knees her opponent in the body, before they wrestle and tussle some more.

Eventually they haul each other to the ground which would seem to favour Daly, the current UK National Grappling Champion. And sure enough, initially she’s the one on top, landing a series of kicks and punches. But suddenly the momentum changes as Helsel manages to tangle her legs around Daly’s head. The technical term is a blood choke triangle.

There’s a reason it’s called that. When someone has you in a blood choke they’re trying to choke the blood going to your brain. They’re hoping you either go unconscious or tap out and concede the fight just before you would.

As the blood gradually began to flow away from Daly’s brain, a number of other thoughts were racing through it.

“I just tried to stay calm,” she says, now that she’s lived to tell the tale. “I’m usually kind of calm in those situations anyway. And what I basically said to myself was ‘Okay, either she’s going to burn her legs out or I’m going to go out [unconscious] but either way I’m not tapping, I’m not quitting. This is probably the end, Ais, but you’re going to hang on to the very last second and no way are you tapping. If you have to go out, you have to go out.’” It boiled down to a battle of sheer strength — her mind against Molly’s legs. As it happened, Molly’s legs gave in first. The lactic acid burned them up and burned them out, and when she tried to readjust them to get a better grip, Daly manoeuvred her way out. She was still on the ground and would take a series of heavy blows from Helsel but eventually she’d make her way back onto her feet, deliver a stunning knee to Helsel’s head and force the American onto the ground to finish with a flurry of punches and shade one of the best fights the division has known.

Her last fight, just eight days ago in Ohio, followed a similar pattern. Her opponent Kelly Warren dominated for most of the first two rounds but momentarily lost focus. Daly capitalised, forcing Warren into submission to retain the North American Allied Fight Series title she captured back in June.

At the moment she’s currently ranked sixth in the world in the 125lb weight division. She’s fought in front of more than 7,000 people in Wembley Arena, virtually all her fights are televised, with millions having watched her on Fox, Setanta and Sky.

For all that effort and all those viewers she’s still not making enough money from it to move out of the family home; her parents often joke she used to be a broke student and now she’s a broke fighter. But being a fighter is pretty much all she’s ever wanted to be.

It’s not that she has this wildly aggressive streak; she can’t recall ever being in a fight outside the ring or gym, and any time there was the hint of one, she sidestepped it.

“I think it’s more that I’ve always had this highly competitive nature,” she claims. “I was always competitive in school, whether it was playing basketball or academically. I’d always put loads of effort into the books because I wanted to be top of the class. I’m just a competitor and I see MMA as the ultimate competition. Everything is mixed together, Olympic-level boxing, judo, wrestling, Taekwon-Do, kickboxing, the lot.

“Physically and mentally, it’s such a tough sport. You have a certain skillset, your opponent has a certain skillset; they’re well trained and you’re well trained, and if you’re not, then you’ll literally get beaten.”

She’d have been about 10 when she was first introduced to the martial arts. The local youth club ran a karate night every Monday, she and her friends went to it, and she liked it, even if she preferred if they’d sparred and fought a lot more. When they did though, she’d stretch it to the limit, often bashing up the boys in her class, prompting her coach Ian Ward to christen her Ais the Bash.

After a few years the pair of them gravitated more towards Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. In that discipline you actually got to fight whereas karate with its formality and non-combat nature was becoming a turnoff.

“You could be a black belt,” says Daly, “without ever giving or taking a real punch. I didn’t want that.”

By the time she was 16, Ward had come across Fogarty, Ireland’s first MMA and Cage Fighter. Their workouts and this MMA lark enthralled her and after one of the first shows Fogarty put on in Dublin, Daly smilingly declared she’d not only be the first girl to fight on one of his bills but be his first female pro fighter too. At the time Fogarty didn’t take her seriously. She was just a girl and just 16, just going through a phase.

She’d keep pleading for the chance to fight but he’d tell her she’d first have to train five days a week. Then when she began doing that he’d tell her he’d have to 10 rounds of rolling. All the time he kept her jumping through hoops, but all the time her Hillary Swank kept answering his Clint Eastwood. She even dropped out of college after studying English and History for two years in UCD. Now she’s effectively his mo chuisle, if not quite his Million Dollar Baby.

For all her TV viewers and all her efforts, she’s still not making enough of this pro career. That’s fine with her though. She has no interest in pursuing some €50,000 a year job; instead she’s been happy just supplementing her income by working once a week in a shoe shop on O’Connell Street to go with training regimen in the gym.

Of course some people thinks she’s nuts. Friends have faded away. She still loves her comedy and will pop down to the International Bar the odd time but that’s about as wild as her nights get now.

“At the beginning I think a lot of my friends thought it was cool having a cage fighter for a friend, and they’d be at my first few fights in Dublin with their ‘Ais the Bash’ t-shirts. But gradually they drifted off. I’d have had friends who would be in a nine-to-five job, living for the weekend, and they found it hard for me to just show my face at a birthday party for an hour because I had a fight coming up. They would have felt I wasn’t being a good friend to them and they didn’t understand the sacrifices that you need to make.”

Her parents have been extremely supportive. It was a bit of an eye-opener for them seeing her first Dublin show and realising it wasn’t quite karate that she was now dabbling in, and even now her mother can’t bring herself to watch. But it was also her mother that told her to quit college if she felt so passionate about this sport; that she could always return to education after she’d pursued her dream.

Some of her fights would be hard for anyone to watch, let alone Mrs Daly. Six months ago in London, Aisling was heavily fancied to defeat the German Sheila Gaff. Instead Daly had submitted before the end of the first round.

“I kind of took her and the fight for granted. I know now that if I’m scared, then that will make me sharp. I need to be a little bit on edge to perform. I need to know that my opponent can hurt me, that they can beat me. Even on the walkout that night I was waving and smiling. I’m never like that.

“Everybody usually says I’m like a psychopath because my eyes are so intense and focused. That night I walked in and it was done so quick, I felt like I’d got mugged. My ranking dropped a good few spots because of it but it was good for me because it taught me where I needed to be, mentally, for a fight.”

In a way so she’s grateful to Gaff for that. Unlike Katie Taylor who took herself off Facebook to avoid engaging with her rivals, Daly counts a number of her opponents, including Gaff, amongst her ‘friends’ online. There’s no opponent she dislikes. The pink hair and the piercing is just something she’s gone with since she left school because, as she puts it herself, “I guess I’m a bit of a punk rock chick”. At the weigh in there might be the odd stare-off but then she’ll just as soon again thank her opponent for agreeing to a fight.

“It’s not in my nature to trash talk. I don’t want to be insulting to someone or be distracted by someone I’m not really thinking about. The only time in the gym my focus relates to my opponent is if there’s something in my game that John thinks she might try to exploit. And even then it’s just an aspect of her, it’s still not about her; it’s just about me improving an aspect she might be stronger than me in.

“When the referee brings us into the centre and asks us to touch gloves, I’ll actually look at the ground because the opponent is just not important to me. She’s just someone in the way of me winning. In a way she’s almost like a weird manifestation of myself, or at least a measure of myself, because ultimately I’m only competing with myself and they’re the gauge of how I’m doing. Even if I win a fight and perform badly, I’ll be pissed off. It’s about being the best I can be, really.”

That means being the best in the world in her weight, unreservedly. Along the way she’d like the sport to be recognised as a legitimate one and for herself to be recognised as an elite Irish athlete. She knows her combat career won’t last forever but she’s pretty certain the sport itself and her passion for it will and already she’s thinking about coaching in the years and decades ahead. Hopefully by then the UFC will recognise women in the sport.

But that’s for later. Now she has another workout in the gym to attend. It may only be days after her latest championship fight but she says the worst she’s ever been left with is a few bumps and bruises. Already she craves the promise of dripping sweat — and resounding laughter.

“In the gym I’m laughing and giggling and having a great time even though I’m training hard. It’s just so much fun for me. The way I look at it is you can get up every day and go to something you don’t really like doing but make a lot of money, or you can get up every morning and go do something that you love doing.” It’ll be a long time yet before this girl taps out.