If you look at the record of Combate Americas atomweight Kyra Batara in a vacuum, it’s not obviously impressive. Although she’s on a three-fight win streak as she heads into her bout against Kanako Murata at Rizing Fighting Federation Saturday night, she sits at 5-3 overall.
Her mother Brenda, who also manages her, knows a success rate of 63 percent doesn’t dazzle on paper. If it leads potential opponents to underestimate her daughter, it’s more than OK.
“I think it’s great. It makes it easier to get fights, for sure. People look at those three losses and go ‘OK, you lost to these people” … that’s why Nicdali (Rivera-Calanoc) took it,” Brenda said in a phone call with Bleacher Report.
Batara fought Rivera-Calanoc (9-9) in her Combate Americas debut after a decision loss three months prior to Kaiyana Rain (1-2). Rivera-Calanoc was 8-8 at the time with nine years of experience on her side, while Kyra was heading into her sixth professional fight. That was September 2015, just under three years after Batara made her amateur debut.
A chance to fight in Combate Americas was too promising to pass on. Billed as the first Latino-targeted MMA reality show and mostly in Spanish, it offered a much bigger platform than any of her other fights, airing on NBC Universo. Maybe Rivera-Calanoc underestimated Batara. Whatever the case, she came out on the losing end, setting off Batara’s current blitz.
Batara next faced Liz McCarthy (2-4) in December 2015, stopping her in the third round with a TKO. It was her next fight that made people stand up and take notice. In April, Batara fought Jenny Silverio (4-2). Batara scored a knockdown in the first 30 seconds and took it to the mat, where she’s most comfortable. She dictated the fight on the ground, forcing Silverio to spend almost the entire round defending. Any success Silverio found in reversals was short-lived, and she headed into the second frame having definitively lost the first.
In Round 2, they exchanged on the feet briefly before Silverio scored a takedown. But that was also short- lived, and she found herself in Batara’s back control. It was from this position that Batara led us to a finish she says coach Eddie Bravo dubbed the “twist and pound.”
The twister, a spinal lock (specifically, a neck crank) executed by immobilizing the opponent’s hips and forcing her head in the opposite direction, is a difficult submission rarely seen in MMA. We didn’t see it here; instead, Batara punched Silverio with one hand until the referee stopped the fight.
“‘You weren’t going anywhere, I have your leg, I have your spine, I have one of your arms behind my back, you have literally one hand to block your face,'” Batara said, also in a phone call with Bleacher Report. “I counted 58 punches repetitively straight to the face. I could see her face turning purple.”
Commentators Rivera-Calanoc, Juliana Pena, and Ray Flores all expressed doubts about the stoppage. Silverio also protested the stoppage, although Batara said she later admitted it was good.
“I’m sure her face (was) telling her the same thing, too,” Batara said.
The highlight-reel finish resulted in a surge of attention for Batara, which she described as surreal. Her following on Twitter increased by a thousand in the days following the fight and offers of interviews streamed in. “This is a three-fight win streak for me, it’s on UFC Fight Pass, I get the title shot next…I feel like I really just kind of blew up as a superstar overnight. I just feel so blessed with everything I have right now.”
While the title fight has yet to materialize, Batara is ecstatic about the opportunity to represent Combate Americas at Rizin FF. It’s a fight that has been in the works for the better part of a year. “It felt so surreal, being able to travel that far, have a big fight like that for a good organization; it didn’t really click with me.
“I’m honored to be able to go to Japan representing Combate Americas, and I know that this is going to be a really tough fight; this is the biggest fight of my career so far.”
Immediately after the stoppage against Silverio, Brenda joined Batara’s corner in celebrating her victory. She’s been at not only every one of her daughter’s fights, but is intensely involved in her training, as well. Managing her daughter’s career is her full-time job, and she can’t think of anyone better to do it; no one will have her daughter’s best interests at heart more purely than she does. She may be onto something.
Brenda’s laser focus is evident in talking to her. She has absolute confidence in Batara’s ability, accentuated by what comes across as typical parental concern filtered through an MMA lens. It has to be at least somewhat difficult for any parent to watch her child step into a cage to fight, but acting as Batara’s manager seems to mitigate that to some degree for Brenda.
Batara is firmly established in her fighting as a strong wrestler with rapidly developing Brazilian jiu-jitsu prowess, and Brenda does everything she can to encourage that. It’s one attempt to limit the potential for brain damage. “When you stand, you’re flipping the coin. You’re taking definitely more blows to the head, a lot more damage. In her last couple fights we’ve seen more stand up. Even now, I still tell her not to. I tell her all the time, stick to your wrestling.”
Maybe if Brenda felt Batara’s striking was as developed as her ground game, she’d advise differently. As it stands, her obsessive attention to the details of Batara’s training sound more intent and invested in her fighter than possibly any I’ve heard from a manager—and from most coaches.
“That’s why I always tell her don’t stand, because you are taking more trauma to the head. That’s why I go to every single one of her practices, because her coaches don’t always see. She has a tendency of dropping her hands a lot, and I’m like, ‘you drop your hands and take that one head kick…’
“We record every single practice of hers so she can see what she’s doing wrong, especially when it comes to stand-up. I don’t want her taking any trauma to the head. I’d rather she get it down as fast as she can.
“When she decides to stand too long, I would worry about it…once it gets to the ground, I don’t worry about it.” It seems to be the compromise Brenda has settled on between supporting her child in doing what she loves and the parental instinct to protect said child.
As a fellow grappler, I’m all in favor of taking fights to the ground as quickly as possible. It’s worked very well for Demian Maia, who’s taken just 13 significant strikes over his last four fights and is due for a title shot at age 38 following a 15-year career. But part of Brenda’s approach is to limit how much Batara trains striking. “We try not to do more than two days a week because she gets too comfortable in her stand up.”
It’s an approach implemented very early in Batara’s career. Her second amateur fight ended in a decision loss to Katie Howard who, Brenda says, Batara beats in grappling tournaments. In their MMA fight, though, Batara stayed on the feet and exchanged blows. “That was the worst thing ever, her feeling a little too confident in her stand-up, and that’s why we try not to do that…that was the only fight where she’s ever really taken damage.”
Discouraging the overall improvement of such an important aspect of a fighter’s game is, thus far, a relatively untested tactic for Batara. She has yet to face an exceptionally skilled and dominant striker, and she won’t in this fight, either. Her opponent Kanako Murata is a highly decorated wrestler making her strawweight debut, coming down from her regular 125. Despite coming off two TKO wins, it’s her wrestling everyone is banking on.
Batara is an underdog in this fight, more so than ever before, but she’s undaunted. “I’m very well rounded and I think that I’ve been preparing much longer than she has, she’s only been doing MMA for a year now. I understand she has a very strong wrestling background, but this is MMA now, so I feel like that I’m going to have a very strong game plan…and she’s not going to be prepared for that.
“I’ve already visualized this fight happening over 100 times in my head. I’ve already seen her style, I know kind of what to expect.”
Japan is one of the earliest adopters of contemporary MMA as a spectator sport and has cultured a wide fanbase—enough to sell out the Super Saitama Arena, which, in its smallest configuration for sporting events, seats 12,500. It’s unclear how the arena will be set up for this event, but the maximum capacity is about 37,000. Either way, it’s the biggest show Batara has ever fought in, and she’s ready.
“I’m going to show everyone why I was the one picked to go all the way to Japan to represent Combate.”
Batara’s manager will be right there with her. They’re a tight team, but the journey to this point wasn’t without some tough terrain.
“People give (Batara) a lot of crap about me being at her practices and managing her and being her mom,” Brenda said. For a short time, Batara let criticisms of their tight relationship get to her. Both she and Brenda agree it was one of the factors responsible for her last loss in June 2015. “She was 20 at the time, and what do you do (at that age)? You kind of listen to other people, she didn’t want us around as much, was kind of like, ‘no, I got this.'”
During her dominant performance over Silverio, Rivera-Calanoc offered this in her commentary:
“I just think that her mom totally spoils her and babies her. I think she needs to grow up.”
Batara has reached a level of comfort with listening to her mom professionally as a grown woman. Maybe after the Rain loss, going back to working more closely with her mom felt like a conscious decision rather than a default dependency. She is, at the very least, at ease with the extent of her mother’s involvement.
“I just want to give a huge thank you to my mom for everything that she does with me. She’s the one that helped me with my weight cut; she was with me in the sauna every night…everything I am I owe to my mother.”
In fact, the Bataras are a combat sports family. Batara says her father has been watching MMA for as long as she can remember. They even have the same favorite fighter: Wanderlei Silva.
“He always did the thing with his hands, and that was always like ‘Oh man, he’s ready, he’s ready!'” she recalls.
Batara’s father also introduced her and her younger brother to wrestling. Brenda was on board from the start. “I thought it was great (when she took up wrestling); we were very supportive of it,” she said.
That support was instrumental in Batara’s combat education. She had difficulty finding training partners in class, leaving her standing alone when the coach told the students to pair up, so she just ended up partnering with her father. They also trained at home. She cites her familiarity with the sport as one of the reasons she stuck with it, and that came via training with her family.
When she joined her high school’s wrestling team in ninth grade, it didn’t go over well. She was the only girl.
“Some of the boys didn’t agree with it and didn’t want me on the team,” she said. It precipitated bullying so extreme she was attacked in the halls and shoved into lockers.
I asked her: Isn’t it nuts how boys and men can get so bent out of shape when you, as a female, don’t do what they want?
“It’s insane. I’m a girl, I’m a little girl, too, 4’11”, this little thing, and it’s funny…it’s an ego thing; they know we can beat them up.
“They call me Mogwai because I’m cute and little, and then I turn into a gremlin in the cage.”
A lot has changed since those days of feeling unwelcome and out of place. Now the mats feel like home. Her goals include being the best fighter in the world, getting the Combate belt and, according to Brenda, making a name for herself like Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano so she doesn’t have to “just fight.”
When I asked Batara if she wanted to add to everything we’d covered, she echoed sentiments I heard throughout the three interviews conducted between her and her mom. They’re very happy with how Combate Americas has treated them the entire time they’ve been working with the promotion. Batara said, laughing, “Make sure to say Combate Americas is blowing up, we’re going to be the best in the world. I love (Combate Americas CEO) Campbell McLaren, he’s the best boss in the world.”
Batara makes her international MMA debut at Rizin FF 2, live streaming at 2 a.m. EDT/11 P.M. PDT from Saitama, Japan. You can watch the live stream here.
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