“No,” said Demopoulos. “And I say that because once I was in the LFA, I had the hardest fights in the LFA. I don’t know if there’s any other female who had a tougher road to getting to the UFC. After I lost on the Contender Series (to Cory McKenna in August 2020), that was rough, and I was like, ‘At least I’m still the LFA champion.’ And then I go in and I fight Loopy (Godinez in October 2020) and I lose that. And I’m like, ‘F**k, can I come back from this?’ And I just did. Again, I told myself the only way my dreams won’t come true is if I let them not come true by quitting. I believed in myself, I knew what I could accomplish and I know what I still can accomplish.”
Clearly, the hunger has not faded for the 33-year-old, who still has that chip on her shoulde that there’s something to prove on Saturday and beyond.
“I haven’t done anything yet,” she said. “I’ve only won one fight and y’all are seeing some cool s**t after one fight, so let me get back in there. This is what I have been working towards for a long, long time, behind the scenes when nobody was watching me, when no one gave a s**t. Now, I’m finally here and you better believe that I have done so much more than everything I can do to continue on this path because this is what I’ve always wanted, and this is what I always believed in and this is what I worked for.”
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If you’ve followed mixed martial arts for any length of time, you’ll know that it takes a special kind of athlete to compete in this space. Correction – a special kind of human being, a special kind of fighter. To get to this point is not easy, and while every fighter who walks up those four steps into a ring or cage has heart, some have a little extra beating in their chest. And though you can debate all day whether that’s something a fighter is born with or not, in Demopoulos’ case it may be a mixture of her DNA and battling through times that would break most people.
“There’s some s**t that’s just intangible, and that’s just what I have,” she said. “The School of Hard Knocks – that’s where it came from. I grew up and I was always aggressive in school. I may be the most positive person ever in the sport, and the reason for that is because I fought my own battles – mentally, emotionally, physically. I grew up fighting. I was in school, fighting. I was kicked out of school for fighting. I used to fight guys in school. I was just a very aggressive, angry child with so much anger and so much hate and so much rage. And I had to learn how to control that rage. I had to learn how to quiet those storms in my mind. I had to learn how to survive on my own in a lot of ways. And as unfortunate as that may sound, I’ve come through so much in my life that you can’t put me away because life couldn’t put me away. And I know that because I’ve been tested so many times. And I think the biggest test that anybody can ever pass is the one against themselves, and unless you’ve really, truly been to those pits, you just don’t know. And not only have I been the nail in the cage, but unfortunately, I used to beat myself up mentally. And I’ve won those battles, as well. There’s nothing that life hasn’t taught me along the way.”
It’s a scary proposition, fighting someone who won’t quit on themselves. Vanessa Demopoulos likes having that intangible in her back pocket, and now that she’s where she wanted to be, she plans on staying a while.
“Some people get married and then other people aim for black belts and UFC titles,” she laughs. “I’m the second one.”
