Lana Stefanac and Women’s MMA–Writer’s Cut

At 5’10” and 210 pounds Lana Stefanac is a Goliath in stature, but her story is pure David. Just three years ago, at age thirty-one, she left behind her life in Ohio for California, drawn West in pursuit of a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Today the Danville resident owns an undefeated record in mixed martial arts, or MMA, the hybrid fighting sport where combatants punch, kick and grapple for victory. She stands at the center of the women’s MMA scene in the Bay Area, setting up fights, managing fighters, and now, with her newly opened school, helping other women realize their own hopes of getting in the cage, no easy endeavor. MMA’s largest and most popular organization refuses to hold women’s bouts. Men dominate most martial arts schools, where women command little attention. And even the sport’s fans are unfamiliar with most female fighters. But Stefanac is undeterred. “Girls love to fight.  When they realize that there’s a community, there’s a group, there’s a resource for that, they will come in flocks.” And like Stefanac did so many years ago, they have.

At happy hour on Monday in an unseasonably hot April afternoon the air is humid and still in Trinity Brazilian Jiu-jitsu, Stefanac’s school on Martin Luther King Jr. Way in Oakland. On the expansive blue mat that covers most of the floor is Sara Schneider, who arrived from Kansas City the day before.  She is one of the best of the fifteen fighters Stefanac manages, and has come for a mixed martial arts match Thursday, in Lemoore, California. She is 5’3” and 135 pounds, with a jaw line like Heath Ledger’s and hair tied into a thick, knotted rope that hangs to the small of her back. She is friendly and speaks at a volume just above a whisper, like a kindergarten teacher at the children’s naptime. That her opponent, Sarah Kaufman of Canada, is undefeated does not seem to concern her. “I’m not worried about someone’s record,” Schneider says, in an uninflected voice. “I’m just focused on what I can do.” Fighters commonly have nicknames, and Schneider’s is White Tiger, Stefanac says. “Because when tigers attack they go for the throat.”

In the last few years MMA has seen its popularity explode. Ultimate Fighting Championship, the main MMA organization, made a reported $250 million in 2007. Its pay-per-view events draw millions of viewers, mostly men. But UFC doesn’t put on women’s matches; the company president has said he doesn’t like to see two women fighting, though he has since softened his stance. Other, smaller promoters mix in a few women’s bouts with their mostly male lineup of fights. The average MMA fan has little knowledge of female competitors, says Loretta Hunt, news editor at the MMA web site Sherdog. “There is no demand for women’s fights,” she says. “I think they’re still considered a novelty on cards.”

On first glance Stefanac and Schneider appear to be opposites. Stefanac is twice Schneider’s size, with an equally outsized personality. She smiles broadly, laughs loudly, and curses heartily. But Stefanac also hales from the Mid-West, far from California’s vibrant martial arts scene. Stefanac was working her roofing business in Ohio and studying kickboxing on the side when one day in 2003 a short and slightly built Brazilian jiu-jitsu practitioner came into her gym to teach a class. Stefanac was skeptical. “It looks cool, but I don’t know if I buy it.” The small man proceeded to subdue a string of muscled fighters with arm bars and rear naked chokes, two Brazilian martial arts submission moves. Impressed and hungry to learn, Stefanac began attending Brazilian jiu-jitsu classes three or four times a week. Today, she continues to feed her passion for the art by working out several times a week, and even keeps a rack of books on martial arts technique in her bathroom.

Stefanac’s life took a dramatic leap forward in 2006. Early in the year she won the heavyweight women’s gold medal at the prestigious Brazilian jiu-jitsu Pan American Tournament in Los Angeles. Then in June she fought her first MMA match, in Oakland. Her opponent was the heavyweight female boxer Martha Salazar. “I was scared shitless,” Stefanac says. She remembers the prognostications of a sports betting web site: 40 to 1 that Stefanac would be knocked out if the fighters stayed on their feet, but the same odds in her favor if the fight went to the ground, an acknowledgement of Stefanac’s grappling skills. Stefanac won at the 2:09 mark in the first round, with a standing submission. That same year, she began traveling back and forth between Ohio and California to see her partner and future wife, Sam Wilson, and to train with more skilled jiu-jitsu teachers, a rarity back home. Then she stopped returning to Ohio, and immersed herself in the Bay Area women’s MMA community. She is now one rung beneath a black belt in Brazilian jiu-jitsu, and has competed in tournaments as far away as Abu Dhabi. She also has pushed her MMA record to 6-0.

Stefanac’s ascent in the martial arts world came alongside few females. “I came up the hard way,” she says. “I trained with men, I fought with men, I came up the jiu-jitsu ranks with men.” Stefanac’s own experiences at other schools, where women are scarce and are ignored if not seen as champion material, inform the atmosphere of her school. “I see a lot of unfairness to girls now, where she may be too small or too little, they don’t give her the right attention,” Stefanac says. Trinity Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu opened last September and is about half male and half female. For many of the women, the school offers the rare opportunity to train with other students their own size, allowing them to attempt techniques more difficult or impossible to use on much larger and stronger opponents. Stefanac’s gym has the feel of an old school boxing academy. The talk can be coarse but friendly (when a student can’t pay because she forgot her wallet Stefanac shouts, “You can’t pay me? I’ll take your first born.”). Everyone has a nickname. And a professional fighter will occasionally drop by; the pro fighter Tonya Evinger rolled with students recently.

The gym is also a gathering place where a woman’s interest in martial arts fosters relationships rather than strains them. “Every woman I know has had some social barrier to them doing this, whether it’s family or work or other guys,” says Katja Turner, who trains with Stefanac. Turner’s father pretends that she is going to school when she trains. Not every student at Trinity has dreams of fighting professionally, but many do, a shared ambition that binds them. “There’s an enormous sense of community and family that comes along with having a group of people who not only take what you do seriously, but are passionate about the thing you’re passionate about,” says Shawn Tamaribuchi, the CEO of an adult film production company and the first female fighter to sign with Stefanac.

Stefanac has led her team of women fighters, the Ladies of Pain, to tournaments in New Zealand and Japan. These women — most of whom have little competition experience — say Stefanac shows a genuine concern for them and their careers. “She cares,” says Amanda Lucas, the daughter of the director George Lucas. “She’s not going to put me up against somebody in an unfair fight.” Jackie Kallen, one of boxing’s first female managers and now a promoter for Fatal Femmes Fighting, a company organizing all-women MMA fights, told me that Stefanac’s fighters all bring a certain level of professionalism. “If you’re getting one of Lana’s girls you know they’re going to show up, they’re going to make weight, and they’re going to put in a good fight.”

But will there by a place for these fighters to compete? Female MMA fighters have no major league to aspire to, but only a handful of fights a year in whatever city will have them.  Since 2007 two of the leading companies holding women’s MMA fights have folded. Fatal Femmes Fighting has spent the year reorganizing, bowed by the economic realities where an all-women’s card at $25 person would mean rows of vacant seats. Sherdog’s Hunt thinks that women’s MMA is at the same point as the men’s sport was seven or eight years ago. “There’s a handful of really good athletes that know the sport, but there’s not enough opportunities,” Hunt says.

Stefanac has taken many risks in the pursuit of her sport. She has just enough paying students to cover the rent for her school, and supplements her income by teaching classes at San Francisco’s Krav Maga gym. Sponsors help out with clothing and a small stipend. But mostly Stefanac depends on Wilson, both emotionally and financially. “I have no job security, except the one I’m building,” she says. She is far from her family and best friends, whom she has not seen in three years. “Sometimes, really late at night, I miss people really bad,” she says.

An hour before Schneider’s match, Stefanac says the bout will be vicious. And it is. At one minute and 43 seconds into the second round, the referee calls the fight. Sherdog describes the fight as a beating. Stefanac remembers the thunking sound of Kaufman’s punches on Schneider’s face as she lay on the mat. Out of the crowd an anonymous voice yells, “pull her hair.” The next day the left side of Schneider’s face, from the top of her forehead on down, runs red. The blot on her forehead slowly turns a thick caramel color.

Schneider, who works in her family’s hardwood flooring business, wishes she could move to California and train with Stefanac full-time. “My career would definitely be different if we didn’t hook up,” Schneider says. “In the back of my head I think I would still be stuck here, in my hometown, without any fights.” After the fight Schneider delays her flight home to attend a tournament where Trinity fighters are competing.

When possible, Stefanac stands by her fighters from the training to the weigh in to their corner during the fight. “I’m there for every step of every part of every way. I’m there on purpose because nobody was ever there for me.” Coming up alone made her better, Stefanac believes. Her record seems to bear this thought out.  But then Stefanac reconsiders. “I think it made me better, but I realize now that some people need that support.  I don’t think I’m one of those people.  I don’t think I needed it.  But it might have been good.  I might have been better or I might have moved along even quicker than I did if I had that type of support.”