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Phaidra Knight is already a pioneer, the only African American woman in the World Rugby Hall of Fame. In 2017, when she retired after three World Cups and 35 US caps, she was 43. Now she’s 50 but on Saturday night in Patchogue, New York, she will claim another first: the oldest woman ever to make her pro MMA debut.
“All roads lead to where I am,” Knight says, by phone from New York, on her way to training, with a sort of fierce zen sentiment familiar from conversations about rugby, the game she found at law school, through which she found herself, and which she came to see as a prop and a flanker as “violent yet controlled, kind of a form of art”.
Describing post-playing ventures including commentating and coaching, in the Bronx and other places far from rugby’s grand pavilions, Knight says she always “continued to work out, continued to train, for nothing specific, just train. And I didn’t find that altogether fulfilling. And so it was 2019, I was on vacation, and someone asked me if I was a famous MMA fighter.”
Knight was mistaken for Amanda Nunes, a Brazilian who famously and brutally ended Ronda Rousey’s UFC career.
Knight was “Like, ‘Wow.’ I was just, like, ‘No, I’m not.’” But she was also flattered, and “went back and told my partner and it was actually her push to say, ‘You know what, you’re not an MMA fighter, but you should be.’ And just like with rugby, I became instantly hooked on the idea of MMA. Following that vacation, I walked through the doors of the Renzo Gracie Academy in New York City and signed up, saying, ‘Listen, I want to be an MMA fighter. So can you guys recommend a coach?’”
Knight was “pretty quickly introduced to my current coach, Rob Constance, and that was pretty much it for me. That started the journey. I started the work. I realized I was starting over, starting at the bottom of something again. I took quite a bit of delight in it, but being in the best academy for Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and grappling in the world, it was certainly a place where I had to check my ego.”
Not for the first time in Knight’s sporting career, hard work paid off. In August 2021, she fought her first amateur bout, beating Jennifer Hlubik by submission in round two of three. Five more amateur bouts followed – and five more wins, two by TKO. In November 2021 she had a small film role, knocking out the director and star of the MMA movie Bruised – James Bond star Halle Berry. In New York, she has trained with another big-time actor, Mad Max star Tom Hardy. Online, under the stark headline “Watch 50-year-old Phaidra Knight destroy Gen Z Opponents”, footage shows her launching into violent action with every inch and pound of her bantamweight frame, punishment raining down on game but outmatched opponents.
Knight points out that she is also “2&0 in amateur Muay Thai”, fights she took on before trying MMA, so her “overall combat record is 8&0”, heading into her first paid fight. In that bout, at Stereo Garden in Patchogue, her opponent will be Diana Karavas. Knight is four inches shorter and 19 years older. And confident.
She “felt very deeply, even when I was done playing rugby, I still had so much untapped talent, or so much untapped athleticism. You can learn skills to the day you die, but when you combine a decent amount of athleticism and skill, and work ethic and just being smart, and coachability, you can can maintain that world-class pedigree. My life over the last five-and-a-half years has really been about health optimization. Some people would call it ‘bio-hacking’, but I think it’s really just optimizing health because it’s about taking all things and employing them, taking low-risk techniques and modalities and utilizing them and figuring out what’s going to work to really slow down the aging process, and in some ways reverse it.”
Knight spends as much time, if not more, in recovery as in training. In training, no longer needing to tackle, pass, run and push for 80 minutes at a time, she focuses on new priorities.
Considering “the explosive nature of fighting”, she finds parallels with rugby. “But I’m also not under threat of my life when I’m on the rugby pitch as I am in the octagon. That’s kind of how you have to look at it. In MMA, someone’s trying to literally hurt you. And that’s not necessarily the objective in rugby. So I’m very sharp now. Speed is one thing that depreciates over time, no matter who you are, but technique is something that doesn’t have to depreciate too. Precision always beats speed. And so as you get older, you learn.”
Dedicating herself to MMA, Knight says, “takes me back to a time when I was 25 and able to run a certain 40-yard speed. I haven’t necessarily tested my 40 speed now, but in terms of reaction and hill workouts, heel sprints, things like that, I’m clocking times I was clocking when I was playing rugby, and not at the tail end of my career. I’m actually much better now than I was at the end of rugby, because I’ve changed things. I’ve had to allow myself to surrender to what my body needs, rather than what my head demands. That’s huge. The ego is incredibly powerful. That has to be checked.”
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In her last two amateur fights, Knight was nearly checked by mysterious physical struggles. The problem turned out to be caused by mold toxicity – diagnosed by her doctor, Andrew Heyman, an expert in the field and “a former rugby player himself” – which in turn triggered early menopause.
“In my fourth fight, I was extremely fatigued. I had a really tough weight cut, and I didn’t have energy, not to mention the fight didn’t start until about 12am. It was a late-night fight. I was extremely tired, more so than normal, and I had a really pretty decent opponent. She was very proficient at grappling. And so that fight went the full three rounds, and I experienced adversity.”
But she won. Her next fight, her last as an amateur, was tough too. Knight “got into the octagon and in the first round, probably in the first minutes, I broke both of my knuckles. I punched the girl, and I think I hit her in the head with both hands. And immediately I was like, ‘Wow, my knuckles aren’t working right.’ I tried to punch again, and it just didn’t feel good. I didn’t tell my coaches. They were like, ‘Why aren’t you sticking to the game plan? Why aren’t you striking?’ And I went back out, the second round, and it just didn’t feel good. So I had to survive. I just had to scramble on my feet. I dominated her. I had to be a little bit unorthodox about it, and revert to more grappling and control, rather than trying to pound her out. And that’s what I did.”
Rugby also demands adaptation and resilience under pain and pressure.
“Rugby is a rough sport,” Knight says with a gentle laugh. “There’s no guarantee that you’re gonna walk away injury free. Same for fighting.”
When Knight played rugby, the women’s game was amateur. After entering MMA, she has continued to run her nonprofit, Peak Unleashed, which uses rugby to help disadvantaged young men and women. That work continues but now she’s fighting professionally, there’s a purse – “not a significant size, but a purse” – for showing up, and there’s a purse for winning. There’s also ambition to win more.
Knight was born in Irwinton, Georgia on 4 July 1974. She will turn 51 this summer. She has no thoughts of retirement. She wants to fight in UFC, the top of her new sport. She sees no reason she shouldn’t.
