LAS VEGAS — Cris Cyborg is headlining Invicta FC 13 on Thursday night here at The Cosmopolitan. The next most popular fighter on the card? She’s the opener.
Marina Shafir is one of the most well-known athletes on the Invicta roster, but she’s just 1-1 as a professional MMA fighter. Shafir is the long-time best friend of Ronda Rousey, the most famous mixed martial artist on the planet. With that has come undue expectations and a measure of fame, at least in this space.
“Yeah, it’s a little weird for me,” Shafir told MMAFighting.com. “I’m very close with my family back home [in upstate New York]. They always keep me humble. The people that are very close to me, I really cherish them very much for that. Having the notoriety that I have is a little silly to me sometimes.”
Shafir, 27, is a fairly big name, far more recognizable to the MMA audience then, say, Invicta women’s atomweight champion Herica Tiburcio, who has less than 1,000 Twitter followers. Shafir has more than 20,000. An argument could be made that, after Cyborg, Shafir is the next most popular Invicta fighter.
Some promotions would exploit that and put Shafir into a high-profile bout that maybe she wouldn’t be ready for. Not Invicta. Shannon Knapp, Invicta president, and matchmaker Julie Kedzie have made the decision to take it slow and build her. That’s the reason why Shafir is opening up Invicta FC 13 against Amber Leibrock, who is making her MMA debut.
“Absolutely, it’s a great thing for my career,” Shafir said. “I don’t ever want to take on a fight that I don’t think I can win. I have all the confidence in myself, but I also know that I have a lot of learning to do. With having Invicta and Shannon and Julie and the whole gang on the same page, I want to help build the future. It’s about me and what I do, but it’s always about the future.”
Shafir absolutely hated losing via first-round knockout to Amanda Bell last August on a regional show in Los Angeles. But now she concedes that it was a good thing for her career. If she beat Bell, it’s possible promoters would have wanted to put her on the fast track. Shafir was a decorated judoka, but she’s still pretty new to the MMA game. She’s only been a pro for 15 months.
“It’s already been a blessing,” Shafir said of the loss. “It’s already been a good thing in my life. I needed it, let’s put it that way. Everything in my life that was happening at the time, it was just kind of calling for that. I’m a big believer in everything happens for a reason. Everything in your life that happens to you eventually forces you to go in a better direction of self. I think I’m in a better place because of it.”
The last year has not been easy. Shafir never fully stopped training, but she did stop training hard. She entered MMA with such high expectations that people were talking her potentially fighting Cyborg before her first pro fight, because the two are in the same 145-pound weight class and Shafir has a following.
Shafir has made the decision in recent months to only listen to those close to her and not those who dwell on social media. Her friendship with Rousey and fellow MMA fighters Shayna Baszler and Jessamyn Duke has nothing to do with who she is as a fighter.
“Everybody else’s expectations aren’t going to help me,” Shafir said. “The people who are close and very near and dear to me and who are actually on this path with me, that’s who I’m going to confide in and who I’m going to prove right by. Everybody else, that’s all speculation and it’s just silly. That’s the fluff I don’t really pay attention to.
“I’m just not a f*cking people pleaser anymore. And I’m still working on it.”
Early this year, Bellator featherweight Georgi Karakanyan asked Shafir to come to his Millennia MMA gym to help him out with judo ahead of his bout with Bubba Jenkins. Shafir did and ended up loving it. For this camp, she stayed in Rancho Cucamonga near Millennia and also drove to Fullerton to CSW where she’s trained by Josh Barnett and Erik Paulson.
On Thursday, Shafir will have Barnett and Millennia’s Betiss Mansouri in her corner. Shafir said she has sparred with UFC welterweight Lorenz Larkin, an electric striker, often since going to Millennia.
“I try to mimic him so much, because I just want to learn from him,” she said. “He has that natural ability that you just want to be around in the gym. I try to go with him as many times as they’ll let me.”
Most of all, though, Shafir is in the correct mental state. The post-loss doldrums have been shaken and Shafir is ready to get on the correct career path. And that, for now, means taking it slow.
No matter what people think, Shafir is just brushing it off when maybe she wasn’t able to in the past.
“That was a big one for me,” Shafir said. “I’m not saying I’m this huge, selfish, narcissistic bitch now. I’m very honest with what I can do, and I’m very honest with what I can’t do. That’s been a very big transition for me.”