“Kickboxing, there isn’t money in it,” she admits. “The style of kickboxing that I’d done was point fighting, and so it’s WAKO tournaments, and maybe the international ones you’d get paid if you won Grand Champion and stuff. But it’s nothing that you can live off. I’d just done it for so long because I literally had passion for it. It was a family business. My dad owns kickboxing gyms, so we were reared in that environment, and I loved it. And I enjoyed every second. And I remember my goal was always that I wanted to go to the Olympics and kickboxing was never in the Olympics. We kept getting told we’d be in the next one, we’d be in the next one, we’d be in the next one. And it’s a four-year gap, so you’re waiting four years and you’re hoping, and then it doesn’t get in again and again and again. And I had won everything there was to win. I had won the WAKO world championships, which is the pinnacle of the sport, seven times. And I won the European six times and it was just like, what more can I do now? So then I switched over to Olympic style taekwondo and I’d done that for about a year-and-a-half in 2017. And I missed punching. It’s very, very traditional. I actually just didn’t like it. I liked kicking, but it was just everything that came with it, I really tried for a year-and-a-half to make myself like it because I wanted to go to the Olympics, but it just wasn’t for me.”
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What was for Bannon was mixed martial arts. She met Holohan while he was coaching in the same facility she was doing taekwondo in. She watched a jiu-jitsu class and was intrigued. Not intrigued enough to make a living at it, but just for fun. Yet while Holohan was out of town, the teacher running things asked her about jumping into the MMA class.
“I was like, ‘No, no, no, I’m here to just do jiu-jitsu, I’m going to have a mellow life, not be competitive,’” she laughs.
He persisted. She acquiesced.
