McMann: Title shot saved my father’s life

Sara McMann recently appeared on The MMA Hour and detailed how her fight with Ronda Rousey saved her father’s life. His lymphoma had returned and he made the decision to forgo chemo, and die. He was in fact on the brink of death, and had put his affairs in order.

The pressure on McMann was such that she started taking anti depressants. Then she got offered the title shot, he determined to live to see it, started chemo, and the cancer is in remission.

“He chose not to do chemotherapy, so he was just choosing that he was going to live with the cancer until it killed him, said McMann to Ariel Helwani as transcribed by Chuck Mindenhall for MMA Fighting. “And the cancer that had come back was very aggressive.”

“He’d gone months of deciding that he wasn’t going to go through chemotherapy and he wasn’t going to live. The fight happened, and it was basically presented to me as, if you don’t take this fight you may never get a chance to fight Ronda, that she may go into movies and this might be the only opportunity. I was really struggling with it, because I hadn’t been training. Things were really hard for me emotionally. I’m a huge daddy’s girl, so it was really hard for me.

“But when I accepted the fight, he was the first person I told about it. And he decided because of it, he was going to go through chemotherapy because he didn’t want to die before he got to see me fight.”

“We had hospice nurses coming to our house. Every time that I drove up there I was very aware that that was the last time that I was probably going to see my dad. He cut it so unbelievably close to death that it’s ridiculous.”

“I needed something. I’ve trained my whole life. Training is a coping mechanism for me. I knew I needed to prepare for something. I needed to be in a practice room. Not practicing made it hard to deal with my dad.”

“Essentially no matter how that [Rousey] fight would have gone, I got more time with my dad. It was going to be a win for me either way.”

The former Olympic silver medalist in wrestling McMann fights Miesha Tate Saturday night at UFC 183. And her dad will be watching!