RIO DE JANEIRO – Amanda Nunes is a champion of firsts.
In 2013, she became the first Brazilian woman to sign with the UFC. Three years later, at UFC 200, she became the country’s inaugural female champion and the promotion’s first openly gay titleholder after submitting Miesha Tate.
Weeks later, she took to the stage at a Q&A session leading up to UFC 201 in Atlanta. Sporting one of the UFC’s official “We are all fighters” tanks with the colors of the rainbow, she was asked by a fan about how being openly gay had impacted her career. “Love is love,” she replied with a smile.
It’s with that same openness and ease that Nunes’ approaches her relationship with girlfriend and fellow UFC fighter Nina Ansaroff. After all, why shouldn’t she?
“I’m here to help people,” Nunes told MMAjunkie. “For me, it’s natural. I post all of it in my pages. This is not a sickness. I don’t do anything to anybody. I’m happy, and this is bad? I don’t think so.
“We’re happy, we enjoy every day and we love each other, and I want to share this with everybody, because I think people have to respect it. People have to be happy seeing other people being happy.”
UFC strawweight Ansaroff – who Nunes refers to as “Ansinha” (which translates to “Little Ansa” in Portuguese), was in the audience during the Q&A. She was also in Rio de Janeiro a few days later, when the newly-crowned champ talked to Brazilian media over dinner. Every now and then, Nunes would poke her, asking for words that slipped or confirmation on specific memories.
Ansaroff is more than a girlfriend for the champ. She’s also a training partner and, ultimately, one of the reasons behind the re-routing that allowed a previously promising-but-inconsistent Nunes to finally ascend to the bantamweight throne.
Having their lives so deeply intertwined, the champion believes, has made Ansaroff a valuable tool in the octagon, as well.
“Nina is with me 24/7,” Nunes said. “She knows everything about me. She knows even the tiny things, like … the way I react to certain music, my emotions when listening to a specific song. This has been helping her to work with me, my emotions and everything. If anyone can help me by my side during a fight, it’s Nina, because she really knows me.
“It’s hard to find a training partner like Nina. Our training matches perfectly. She is very tough. She is 115 pounds, but we train as equals. For Miesha, my training was with Nina and the amateurs – I only had two training sessions with guys – and Nina was more work during training than Miesha was during the fight. So, it’s hard to find this type of type of partner, when you know you’re going to evolve even with her being a different division.”
While Nunes now appreciates Ansaroff as a driving force on multiple fronts, that wasn’t the case from the start. In fact, when the strawweight first showed up at Florida’s MMA Masters gym, Nunes saw her now-girlfriend as competition – and treated her as such.
“Back in the day, the first sparring sessions I had with her were very aggressive,” Nunes said. “It was an ego thing – new girl at the gym, stuff like that. When she got there, I was the only woman at MMA Masters, so my head was like, ‘There can’t be another woman. It has to be me.’ And I shouldn’t think that way, because she could help me as well. But I didn’t think like that. ‘I’m the ‘Lioness’ here. There can’t be another.’”
That, however, changed. As the pair began hanging out more and more outside of the gym, Nunes began a deeper internal shift that reflected on her outlook when it came to training.
“I started seeing Nina as a training partner and friend,” Nunes said. “And as a person I trained with in order to help, not hurt. Nowadays, it’s hard to spar with her. I don’t want to hurt this face! Everything changed when I started working at being a better person, seeing life from a different angle.
“I get a bit emotional because … you go through phases, right? You need to face those stages in order to improve as a person. This is something that helped me a out a lot. Meeting Nina made me change every day, even in practice. Nowadays, when spar with her, it’s entirely different. We stop, say ‘I caught you here, let’s not do this anymore.’ We help each other out.”
The decision to leave MMA Masters for America Top Team was also one made as a couple – a move sparked by the fight that Nunes sees as a career turning point: a UFC 178 loss to Cat Zingano. It was that night, after once again seeing adrenaline get the best of her, that the champion decided she could no longer ignore the signs that something was lacking.
With the help of Ansaroff, a former psychology major, she began to address the issues that led her to lose steam.
“When I left the cage after that fight, I sat down with Nina and I said, ‘Something’s wrong,’” Nunes said. “We need to change. In order for me to be champion, it needs to happen now. It was that fight. The following day, we started working. We went online, looked for other athletes who experience the same thing I did. At the gym I was doing well, … and then at the fight I got tired? Your head doesn’t get it. It’s draining. Your head is not ready and sends a message to your body, it shuts down.”
With Ansaroff in camp at that time, they decided to wait. The strawweight, however, also lost her fight, and the pair took that opportunity to start fresh.
“Two defeats, it was perfect, no better way to start things off,” Nunes said. “Let’s take this sad moment and make it a positive, a change. Let’s leave, go to the best team in the world, ATT, and we’ll take it from there. My life changed from night to day after that.”
Nunes then started working with American Top Team co-founder and coach Marcus “Conan” Silveira, who she also credits as a major player in her evolution. But it wasn’t just the new team that changed things. Nunes also had to deal with the constant state of agitation that had been present in her life since childhood.
The road to self-discovery involved books, music, meditation and finding pleasure in things other than fighting.
“For me to be champion, I didn’t have to train 24/7,” Nunes said. “For me to be champion, I needed to train my head, because the body was trained. My mind needed to catch up in order for me to go up there complete.
“I was never one to stop, grab a book and just read it because I couldn’t just stand still reading. That was something I added to my camp for Miesha Tate – time to meditate, to read a book, to leave the fight and go to a different world, to work on my mind, do un-related things. Read a book that has nothing to do with fighting, go on a walk, play with my dog, go fishing with Nina. I really like shooting, playing soccer, hanging out with friends, things I didn’t do.
“All I thought about was training. You know that athlete who leaves the gym and is already thinking about the next day’s training session? That was Amanda. That was getting in the way. I was mentally overtrained. I had to change, radically. So this was one of the things that really helped me arrive strong to UFC 200.”
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