Joanne Calderwood throws more than twice as many strikes as the average UFC fighter.
Since she has knocked out nearly half of the nine opponents she’s faced as a pro and has never really come close to losing in an official fight, I imagine she could dust me off without much of a problem.
So I better be on the safe side and ask first: Does she prefer to be called “Joanne” or her nickname, “JoJo”?
The answer comes in a thick, lilting Scottish squeak more befitting a concerned church mouse than a world champion in muay thai.
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’ll answer to anything, really.”
It’s not the kind of restless brush-off one gets used to on the fighter-interview assembly line. She seems to mean it.
As the conversation continues along, we talk about Maryna Moroz, her opponent at this Saturday’s UFC Fight Night 64. We talk about Poland, where the fight will happen and where she just arrived for the first time a few hours ago. We talk about her plans to see the country, which involve dinner with her Mom the day after the fight, circumstances permitting.
“It’s the first time I’ve ever stayed a day after a fight,” said Calderwood.
Throughout, the dialogue is punctuated by pauses long enough that I start to wonder whether she nodded off or got up and simply wandered away.
Calderwood couldn’t be anything other than herself if she tried, which she isn’t. It’s a big part of the Glasgow native’s popularity, in her home country and beyond. On the 18th season of The Ultimate Fighter, which introduced viewers to the UFC’s new women’s strawweight division, Calderwood stuck out as a focused and soft-spoken exception to the rule.
Having been officially formed in November 2013, the weight class is still in “newborn” status at the UFC level. As such, the land rush is on to find MMA‘s first 115-pound star. Some fighters are using looks or quotes to get a leg up in the race.
But lots of fight fans respond to something different when evaluating athlete personalities. They gravitate to authenticity. Others like humility. Oh, and also violence.
There’s Calderwood: She’s Scotland’s quiet storm, and though talking about herself (or talking at all) isn’t really her cup of tea, destroying people in the cage most certainly is.
But don’t take my word for it. Take it from MMA statistician and analyst Reed Kuhn:
Joanne @DRkneevil Calderwood averaged a blazing pace of 20 strike attempts/minute while standing in her @UFC debut, almost twice the average
— Fightnomics Reed (@Fightnomics) April 7, 2015
Yes, her nickname is Dr. Kneevil. And yes, she throws hellacious knees. In her debut for the Invicta promotion, Calderwood felled Ashley Cummins with a single attack of the patella, pinpointed right on the liver. After the knockout, Calderwood didn’t swarm but virtually skipped away, confident in the finishing power of the strike and elated by the victory.
Her kicks and punches aren’t bad, either, as you might expect of a world-class muay thai practitioner. This propensity for violence and her retiring personality makes for an interesting combination and quickly earned the attention of the MMA spotlight.
When the UFC announced its new division and the TUF season that would introduce it to the world, Calderwood was on the short list of must-have contestants.
It wasn’t exactly a perfect fit for an introvert, though.
“I thought I had to,” Calderwood recalled. “But everything happens for a reason… I do as I’m told.”
Calderwood stops short of saying she wishes she hadn’t gone through with it—”I don’t regret anything,” she said—but she also doesn’t make any effort to hide her displeasure with the experience and her fellow cast members, some of whom came off on the show as divisive or unsupportive of other fighters.
“I went in very positive,” she said. “I didn’t want to show any emotion on camera, made it so no one could see I was upset… But there were so many negative people. I was really traumatized.”
Calderwood declines to name names, saying “it’s for the UFC to decide,” but she doesn’t really need to do so to make her point.
Are there any cast members she’d want to fight?
“Yeah, all of them,” she said. “I would never spend my time with those other girls. I wouldn’t spend five minutes in their company if I didn’t have to.”
Those clashes seem inevitable, given that four of the five fighters ranked ahead of her in the official UFC rankings—Tecia Torres, Jessica Penne, Rose Namajunas and season winner and inaugural champ Carla Esparza—also competed on the show. A fight with the equally aggressive Namajunas, who upset Calderwood with a submission in the season’s quarterfinals, may be especially appealing.
But with the division still coalescing, there could be bigger fish to fry. There’s a new champion in Joanna Jedrzejczyk, and there happens to be a UFC event scheduled in Scotland this summer. The planets could be aligning for Calderwood, who is fiercely proud of her home nation and the support she has there.
“I know that I’m very proud of where we’re from. It’s a really small country, but we love MMA,” she said.
Those planets could stop in their tracks, though, if she doesn’t get a win this Saturday.
Though Calderwood won her UFC debut proper by dominating Seohee Ham in the TUF 18 finale, this will be her first fight unaffiliated with the show in any way. Moroz is a heavy underdog to Calderwood but is still 5-0 and skilled in submission grappling, an area of relative weakness for the Scot.
“I hadn’t heard of her before the fight, but I looked her up right after I heard,” Calderwood said. “She has a good record. Four submissions… I don’t know what to expect. I think she might definitely try to go to the ground, but I can’t think that, because what if she wants to stand with me?”
If Calderwood is feeling any pressure to win or to display strong grappling, if she is daydreaming already of a triumphant walkout in Glasgow this summer, counting the days until the UFC announces a grudge match with any one of those girls from the show, having a tough time with the weight cut or excited to be in Poland, she isn’t showing any of it.
That’s for the cage. But it’s not to say she’s a bland interview in the meantime. In the end, I ask her if there’s anything she wants to say to her fans.
“I’m blown away by the people who believe in me and like me for who I am,” she said.
There’s a long pause. Maybe this time, she really has wandered away. Then her voice returns, even quieter than it was before.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “It makes me emotional just talking about it.”
Scott Harris covers MMA for Bleacher Report. For more, follow Scott on Twitter. All quotes obtained firsthand.
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