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“I always believed that I was fighting just for me, but now I’m not fighting for me anymore. I fight for people that have faced adversity in life. I fight for people that have been bullied. I fight for people that don’t believe. I fight because I want to show all of them that there are going to be people in your life that will say you can’t do something, but I’m the living proof everything is possible. All you have to do is believe. Sometimes we need haters because then we know we’re on the right track. So, I’m not just fighting for me; I’m fighting for all of us.”
Last year, Germaine would face another terror, but this time it was not delivered via an anonymous hater, but by a medical professional. She would learn that she wasn’t going to be able to fight any longer. It was a devastating blow to a woman that is a fighter at heart, someone who sleeps and breathes fighting and lives by the bushido code of integrity, honor, respect and discipline.
“The doctors told me ‘you will never fight again,’” she recalled. “I cried like a little girl for maybe a week. Is this the end? After everything I have been through: being stripped of the title, all the negativity surrounding my fight with Holly, I’m like, ‘Is this seriously how it’s going to end? Is this it?’ And then I looked at Samantha and I looked at my mum and said, ‘I’m done crying. Watch me, I’m gonna come back’. And again, I did it. I told the doctors, ‘I decide when I stop, I decide when it’s enough.’”
Mercifully, for Germaine and her fans, the show went on and she was medically cleared to fight former UFC title challenger Raquel Pennington in Denver last November. Despite being absent from competition for 21 months, the former UFC champion shut down the gritty wrestling game of Pennington and at times pieced her apart with her well-versed striking. The victory was a sweet one, but not perhaps for the reasons one would imagine.
“It was a rollercoaster of emotions because I was enjoying being back in that cage. I was enjoying it so much that I forgot I was in a fight and was facing someone that wants to rip my head off and you should have tried to rip her head off. But I was enjoying being there so much that the fight went the way it went. Afterwards I realized I did it again – I beat all the odds again. There’s a lot of people that only see the UFC show. They see us walking out the tunnel, but backstage, when the curtains are closed, that’s where everything happens. That’s where all the build-up comes from.
