Tunnel vision is a side effect of adrenaline. It comes on during extreme moments like, oh, say, a fight.
But during the fight, Lauren Murphy was seeing just fine. After three rounds with Liz Carmouche at UFC Fight Night 63 last April, her eyes and head were about as clear as they could be.
The tunnel vision didn’t come until after the fight. By that point, the adrenaline had dissipated. There’s another cause of tunnel vision, though: distress.
It came over Murphy in a whoosh when she heard the judges’ decision: 29-28 across the board for Carmouche.
“I was heartbroken,” Murphy recalled. “My mouth dropped open. You get tunnel vision when you’re shocked, and I was shocked. I felt like I couldn’t f–king see. I thought I won every round. I backed her up. … We got back [to the locker room] and I just lost it. I was crying. I wanted to throw stuff or break something.”
Sadly, plenty of fighters can spin a hard-luck yarn about a dicey judges’ decision that didn‘t go their way. What sets Murphy’s ordeal apart is that it happened twice in a row.
Two fights under the UFC banner, two close decisions that didn’t go her way.
How do you move forward from that? What wrongs, if any, do you right? For Murphy, a popular women’s bantamweight who won gold in the all-female Invicta promotion before hitting the UFC with a perfect 8-0 record, it gave an icy tinge to an already-stiff headwind.
A 2014 move to a big-time MMA camp wasn‘t going as she’d planned. A legal struggle for custody of her child was going full bore. She regularly cried or lashed out during training. Self-doubt had a foothold. A visit to a sports psychologist helped, but she hadn’t quite been ready to listen fully.
Those judges last April made her ready.
Now, almost one year later, Murphy says she’s a fighter in full. And she has a chance to prove it—and finally reach the UFC win column—Sunday against late fill-in replacement Kelly Faszholz at UFC Fight Night 83 in Pittsburgh.
Double Jeopardy
In casual conversation, Murphy curses like a Pulp Fiction character. It contrasts a bit with her agreeable demeanor. But the two things together seem to want to summarize her: She’s calm until she’s not.
When discussing the first of her two controversial losses, she does so with notable equanimity. It was 2014, and it was a split-decision loss to Sara McMann, the Olympic wrestling silver medalist.
Although the first decision was nearly, if not equally, as controversial as the second, it’s surprising to see how little it bothers Murphy, particularly when accounting for the fact that it was her first fight in the UFC and her first defeat as a professional.
“I watched it later,” Murphy recalled in an exclusive interview with Bleacher Report. “It could have gone either way.”
The real problem with the fight’s outcome, from Murphy’s perspective, was its marked lack of energy. When you’re known for a high-octane approach, as she is, excitement is more than a luxury.
“Some people said I won, some people said I lost, but mostly I focused on the people who said it was boring,” Murphy said. “I had never been in a boring fight before. My fights in Invicta were never boring. I just never thought that would be an outcome of my fights. That bothered me the most.”
While she took an analytical approach to her loss to McMann, the Carmouche fight is another story. Carmouche came on in the third round, but Murphy and her corner felt she had done more than enough to win the first two rounds and a decision.
“She grabbed and held me or she f–king ran away the whole f–king time,” Murphy said. “She smirked at me once about it. … She thought she was being cute with her footwork and she smirked at me.”
Then Bruce Buffer read the verdict. If the McMann decision was a toss-up, this was a holdup. Social and traditional MMA media howled. Even now, almost one year later, Murphy’s voice audibly breaks when she discusses the fight.
“I’m getting emotional now just thinking about it,” she said. “I just want to go back and get those moments back and change one thing. I’d give anything to be able to do that.”
Professional Help
Murphy is not going to say the Carmouche fight was a blessing in disguise or that it set her on some road to redemption. She seems to prefer the messy truth over a clean storyline.
At the same time, it was undoubtedly a psychological tipping point.
“It had been building up for so long,” Murphy said. “Everything had been festering. That Liz Carmouche fight blew it all up.”
Or at least gave it a form. The defeat, coming as it did in the context that it did, was something rotten to isolate and overcome.
“I went to the sports psychologist a couple of times before the Liz Carmouche fight,” she said. “There was good stuff, but it didn’t sink in. It takes a while to go in and dig that stuff out and root around in there.”
The original impetus came in 2014, when Murphy, who cut her MMA teeth in her native Alaska, relocated her training headquarters from Gracie Barra Katy near Houston to The MMA Lab in Colorado—home to notable fighters such as Benson Henderson, John Moraga and Luke Sanders.
Though it was a fertile training ground, the days were hard. Sometimes, they were overwhelming.
“We’d do hard sparring, and guys were working me over on a daily basis,” Murphy said. “I thought, f–k, I’m not good. I didn’t believe in myself. I’d do hard rounds, and then I’d cry. I wasn’t even there.”
The Carmouche loss only perpetuated the vicious cycle. Without visits to the sports psychologist, Murphy said, she may not have been able to break it. But with professional, targeted counseling, she slowly learned how to replace bad with good.
“We’d look at stuff in my past that was successful. Past fights, and what they looked like,” Murphy said. “The goal was that I would try to be nicer to myself.”
Keeping that green-eyed beast out of your brain is far easier said than done, and it required time, focus and reps. It was just like any other aspect of training.
“I think it’s just as important as learning jiu-jitsu or kickboxing or whatever,” Murphy said. “You can’t go into practice like you suck. You say that last right hand was sloppy, you say ‘the next one is gonna be better,’ instead of ‘I suck.’ That’s not how you learn.”
Her psyche freshly bulwarked, Murphy set about building up her physical tool box and waiting and hoping for a UFC number to appear on her phone. She acclimated to the intensity of The MMA Lab. Her custody battle was settled, with Murphy receiving full custody of her son.
For the first time in a while, she was seeing clearly again. And she was ready to redeem herself in Pittsburgh. She doesn’t even seem to carry a grudge for Carmouche. At least not much of one.
“I guess I’d [fight her in a rematch] if they asked, but I’ve already beaten her,” she said. “Her style is so f–king boring anyway.”
Then, barely a week before Pittsburgh, news came that her opponent, Sarah Moras, had pulled out with an undisclosed injury. But by this point, Murphy almost seemed to know it would work out. What other bad cards does MMA karma have left to deal her?
“I want to just let it all f–king go,” Murphy said of her bout with Faszholz. “I’m definitely not afraid. … I’m ready for anything. This fight isn’t the culmination of a six-week camp. This is every hour of training I’ve put in since the fight with Liz. Beyond that, even, the whole last year has been eye-opening for me.”
Scott Harris writes about MMA for Bleacher Report. For more, follow Scott on Twitter. All quotes obtained firsthand.
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