“Do you know, one of my life's ambitions, something I never got to do in MMA – ticked off everything, fought in MSG, Vegas, Boston – I'm yet to fight in Ireland,” Molly McCann told me after announcing she had signed with Eddie Hearn’s Matchroom Boxing.
Well, she will achieve just that Saturday when she makes her professional boxing debut at Windsor Park in Belfast, Northern Ireland.
After a successful career in mixed martial arts, McCann, at the age of 35, is making a switch from the octagon to the squared circle. Not many MMA fighters have made a successful switch to boxing, Francis Ngannou’s flattening by Anthony Joshua springs to mind when one thinks of a fighter from MMA stepping into the ring, along with the numerous that have been bowled over by Jack Paul. But this will not be the first time McCann has been in a boxing ring. When she was a teenager, before she found her way to the NXT GEN MMA gym, she learnt the sweet science at the Golden Gloves Amateur Boxing Club in Liverpool, England.
There she learnt her craft alongside the likes of James ‘Jazza’ Dickens and Anthony Fowler, winning a senior ABA title at the age of 19. Things were looking good for McCann, but why didn’t she continue in a sport she clearly had talent in?
“My weight didn't go to the Olympic Games, so I thought I'm not, there was no pro [boxing] then, there was nothing,” said McCann. “So then I went to uni to be a PE teacher and then ended up stumbling into an MMA gym hungover and then ended up making a life for myself that way. But we always find our way back, don't we? This was always on the cards for me, it was just about the right time. I took some big losses in MMA and it was probably all for this reason to bring me back.”
The sport was not the same back in 2009. There were limited opportunities, with women’s boxing not even an Olympic sport yet. McCann felt there was no money in the game and looked elsewhere.
“So Nicola Adams, Savannah Marshall, Chantelle Cameron, Tasha Jonas, that was who was winning the national championships then,” she recalled. “And the only pro in the game, if you're worth your weight in salt, was Jane Couch. And she'd done it, she was the only person we could aspire to be, or Leila Ali, that was all you were looking at. So I knew that wasn't my career, I wasn't going to go and do pro [boxing]. I just knew, I just fell into MMA and it so happens I fell back into boxing.”
With MMA fighters having such a poor record in the squared circle, why does McCann feel she will have success, having not boxed for 16 years? She believes that her MMA training has refined her boxing style to suit the professional game.
“I just think my amateur style probably wouldn't work in the pro game, but from how I've had to learn to sit down on my shots in MMA, that will transfer,” McCann said. “Eddie [Hearn] has never seen me spar, never seen me hit pads, but he's been there and watched me throw 300 punches in 15 minutes and flatline a girl with a spinning elbow. He knows what I'm capable of, and I know what I'm capable of, and it's going to be not having to worry about a knee, a takedown, an elbow, and just two fists – and that's music to my ears. I'll take someone who's got a five-inch reach on me over having to stop a takedown – seven days out of seven.”
McCann will make her debut this Saturday against Kate Radomska (4-7) in the junior featherweight division but plans to move down to bantamweight for a title fight. And can she win a world boxing championship? “Without a doubt,” said McCann.
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When I first attended university at Liverpool John Moores, we were paid a visit by McCann, a former student of LJMU, on our first day. She was at the height of her MMA career, flying high in the UFC and told us a rather funny story about how she got the nickname ‘Meatball’.
“I was at university at the time and I was playing for Liverpool Football Club and I had to make ends meet,” McCann recalled. “So 16, 17 year old working in Subway and I walked in the [MMA] gym and my coach went, ‘You fucking stink of meatballs,’ and then that was it, ‘Meatball’ Molly. When I used to box, they used to call me the machine because I'd just throw a load of punches like a machine gun, but I was in the same gym with Anthony Fowler and that was his name. So I thought, you can have that, I'll go and get something else.”
