![]() “Some took care of me, others didn’t, and others left me in the streets.”Īlex Davis, who would later become Gomes’ manager, recalled hers as a troubling, though not exceptionally uncommon, story among poor children in Brazil. “I was passed around as a child,” she said. Her parents, she said, weren’t capable of raising her, so they gave her away. It didn’t help that Gomes hadn’t exactly been dealt a great hand as a child. ![]() “All I (could) think about was getting high, and getting into trouble out in the streets.” Before she found jiu-jitsu, Gomes said, she was “a hardcore cocaine addict,” living on the streets. Here’s what you have to understand about the Gomes who showed up that night in Sao Paulo: She was going through what she would later refer to as “a difficult period” in her life. I grew up fighting in the streets to survive. “For me, fighting was survival,” Gomes told MMAjunkie, in her native Portuguese. For Gomes, that was all she needed to hear. A friend told her about the underground, bare-knuckle, no-rules operation that Rio Heroes was running, and also told her that she could make as much as $500 if she won. She’d been trying to break into pro fighting but was having trouble getting a bout. But back in 2007, when she showed up to fight a local male kickboxer for the now-defunct Rio Heroes organization, she was a reformed drug addict and former Sao Paulo street kid just trying to make some money.Īnd yeah, Gomes will tell you now, that’s mostly what it was about for her, was the money. The woman is Ediane Gomes, who’s now 36 and a seven-year veteran of professional MMA. You’d be right, of course, and depending on your own personal sensibilities, you’d probably also be fascinated or horrified by what comes next. ![]() ![]() You’d also swear that this guy standing between them in a T-shirt that reads “No Rules” was encouraging them to do so. If you didn’t know better, you’d swear they were about to fight, this man and this woman. A woman in a sleeveless shirt, clenching her bare fists and bouncing from foot to foot like she’s standing on a hot stove. A shirtless male kickboxer, idly checking his cup. You see them standing there before it starts. ![]()
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