Issue 130
July 2015
Bantamweight contender Marion Reneau tells FO how she broke down barriers to chase her UFC championship dream.
Age: 37
Pro debut: 2010
Nickname The Belizean Bruiser
Team: Elite Team
Division: Bantamweight
Height: Five-foot-six
Style: Jiu-jitsu/boxing
When it comes to proving doubters wrong, Marion Reneau has plenty of experience. The UFC women’s bantamweight contender has been told what she couldn’t do for most of her life, but she’s done it anyway.
Growing up, she wanted to box. But her father, a Belizean immigrant who had family ties to the sport back in his home country, stopped her from participating because she was a girl.
“My dad had uncles who were boxing champions in the country and in Jamaica,” she says. “At an early age, he was teaching my brother how to box and I remember asking him if he would teach me. I love my dad, but he didn’t think that women should be in boxing because that’s how he was raised. Women don’t box because they’re in the kitchen. Ironically, I ended up becoming the fighter and my brother became the chef.”
Initially, Reneau accepted her father’s decision and turned to other sports to quench her thirst for competition. She excelled in track and field and was a hopeful for the Sydney Olympics in 2000 for heptathlon, but a hamstring injury killed her aspirations of an athletics career.
In the following years, she put her dreams aside to raise her now 13-year-old son, Xavier. During this time away from the sporting world, Reneau ballooned up in weight by 80lb. Unhappy with the way she looked and still harboring a thirst to compete, she dropped the weight in eight months.
With track and field no longer an option, Reneau searched for somewhere to rekindle her fascination with combat sports.
“In the area I’m from there weren’t many options for gyms,” she says. “So I waited but still kept in shape and started lifting weights. However, it got to a point where I was bored and needed something different. One of my friends, who used to be a professional boxer, started training me in her garage and I loved it.
“When I found out you could do elbows and knees in MMA and go to the ground – it’s just something I wanted to do. I called a number of gyms and asked if I could train but they were a bit skeptical.
“However, I called Tom Knox, who is my jiu-jitsu coach, and asked him if he would train a female. He said yes without any hesitation. He was the first one who didn’t stutter or pause when I asked him. I showed up and I’ve never left his gym.”
Now with a home at the Elite Team in Visalia, California, Reneau won her first professional bout in 2010 by TKO, but it took her another two years to compete again because opponents kept pulling out. When she finally found a fight, she lost a unanimous decision. But that loss taught her a valuable lesson that molded her into the offensive force she is today.
“I know I could’ve won that fight before it went to decision,” she says. “It taught me a lot about finishing fights, developing that killer instinct and maintaining it throughout the fight. I don’t like that feeling of losing which is pretty much why I go out to finish every time I compete.”
She applied her new focus to the letter in her next fight and scored a 10-second KO. She hoped that would be enough to secure a spot on TUF 18 as one of the show’s first female competitors, but UFC president Dana White told her she was too old. Reneau was sent back to the regional circuit to win a few more fights and earn her spot in the sport’s leading organization.
“I think (that) was the best thing that could’ve happened because it made me work a little bit harder. It made me more determined to succeed and made my management more determined to get my name out there.
“So I got two more fights and won both of them. After that, we were basically in their ear constantly trying to get them to give me a fight. When (the UFC) gave me that chance against Alexis Dufresne I knew that I wasn’t going to lose it. Absolutely not.”
The Californian beat Dufresne into a bloody mess over 15 minutes in her Octagon debut. White admitted he was wrong about her TUF snub and apologized. She had her spot in the big show, but her next fight, just seven weeks later, made the rest of her division take note.
She traveled to Porto Alegre, Brazil in February to face highly touted Jessica Andrade. The odds were stacked against her, but that killer instinct was tuned to perfection and she quickly locked the Brazilian in a fight-finishing triangle choke.
“It was so surreal because I realized all these people wanted to see me lose,” she says. “During the fight, I was talking to myself the entire time, reminding myself to keep my feet underneath me.
“Suddenly, she’s in my triangle so I locked it in and finished it. The moment she tapped there was complete silence in the arena. That meant that everybody back home was screaming their asses off. It was very satisfying.”
That win established the division’s oldest fighter as one of its leading contenders. Now the BJJ brown belt has her sights set on fighting through her contemporaries to reach Ronda Rousey at the top of the pile.
“I actually want to fight the girls who haven’t fought Ronda yet. I want to fight the contenders that the UFC are looking at. Let me fight them, take them out and then I’m going to be the contender. I don’t care who it is, I just want to fight. I want to be the person everyone is talking about.”
