“I can say that I’m very well-versed in life,” said Demopoulos. “I’m extremely skilled in so many different areas of my life, which is such a blessing – and also a distraction because I can do so many other things, but I choose to fight. And I think knowing that is part of the reason why I’m still so in love with it. It’s a conscious decision where I’m like, no, I love this that much. I can do anything else. I can go and be a public speaker. I can be an author, I’m really good at reading charts and trading stocks. I can do so many other things with my life. But I choose to put my heart and soul into being an athlete, and a fighter, at that. I had WWE as an option, I still have American Ninja Warrior hitting me up – I have a lot of options on the table for myself and I choose to be a UFC fighter. So, with that, I don’t see this ever being something I want to be done with. I sacrificed for this and I chose this. I don’t know how people get sick of it, I really don’t. And I’ve seen those people, too, and I just don’t get it.”
In 2021, all the sacrifices paid off when she stopped Cynthia Arceo in 37 seconds in a March LFA bout, setting the stage for a short notice call to step in for her Fight Ready teammate Tracy Cortez against Aldrich in August. Was it an ideal situation to move up to 125 pounds to face a UFC vet with a week’s worth of a training camp? Did Demopoulos care? Absolutely not. In fact, given that she was preparing for an LFA fight when she got the call and having experienced what it’s like on a UFC fight week when she fought on Dana White’s Contender Series in 2020, it wasn’t a bother at all.
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“I fought on the Contender Series and that’s just like being in the UFC without actively being on the UFC roster,” she said. “That was actually more alarming when I got the call for Contender Series because it was right after my title fight, I had three weeks to get my s**t together after I just fought four hard rounds, on top of flying out, doing the paperwork, doing all the photo shoots, flying back, trying to train. That was way more difficult than getting signed to the UFC officially.”
See, glass half full. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows in the fight game, and the 33-year-old will be the first to tell you that hard times are part of the gig, especially on the way to the big show.
“I think I’m in a weird position because I don’t have to do this, but I still suffer to do it,” she said. “I put myself into different types of financial crises in the past just because I chose fighting over other money opportunities. But this is what pays my soul, versus paying my pocket. There’s different types of value, there’s different types of success and the financial success, to me, that’s only one area of your life. Who are you at the end of the day, when your life is lived, and you get to read that storybook back to your grandkids? Who were you? Were you someone who just lived in an office building and made shit tons of money, but you had no life, and you literally traded your life for dollars? I would rather trade my life for experiences. And that hunger is there because it’s what my soul is craving, not what my pocketbooks are, and I think that’s more powerful than anything in this world. Who are you? What’s your purpose? What’s your passion?”
