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Molly McCann Embraces Adversity As Part Of Her Story
Liverpool’s Molly McCann Believes In Her Ability To Bounce Back From Hard Times As She Hopes To Get Her Hand Raised Again At UFC Fight Night: Edwards vs Brady
Molly McCann could very well choose to walk away from fighting and do so with her head held high. Fighting in the UFC for the last seven years, McCann made history as the first Englishwoman to win in the Octagon, produced one of the best knockouts of the decade and won over fans from across the world. Outside the Octagon, she constantly uses her platform for good, lending herself to charity organizations and championing causes in her native Liverpool seemingly every week. She has even successfully opened a restaurant and coffee shop. In her own words, she could “happily walk away,” but the chance to show the world what she’s made of is something McCann can’t help but embrace with open arms, which is why she is days away from making her return at UFC Fight Night: Edwards vs Brady.
“I think for me to show people who I am and really what I’m about, (I’ve) got to show them how you come back from this bit of adversity,” McCann told UFC.com.
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Bouncing back from hard times has really become a staple for the “Meatball.” She dropped her UFC debut and promptly responded with three wins in a row. After hitting a two-fight skid and having her back against the wall, she collected three wins and three bonuses, including two now-iconic spinning elbow knockouts in London. Back-to-back losses pushed her to make the move down to strawweight, and she collected a submission win and another bonus.
Fighting was a place of pain and ecstasy, of hardship and sanctuary, but it was grueling all the same.
As she prepared for her second fight at 115 pounds against Bruna Brasil, McCann said she went through “a lot of tragedies and a lot of changes” in her personal life. She locked in and poured herself into training, saying that even getting to the fight was “everything.” But the fight game is unforgiving, and when Brasil threw a low kick to start the fight, McCann felt a jolt of pain which would later reveal itself as a fractured leg. A minute later, she suffered a groin strike, and by round’s end, she was wide-eyed and compromised. She bit down on her mouthpiece and somehow got through the rest of the fight, nearly sinking in a rear-naked choke in the final round, but ultimately ended up on the wrong side of the scorecards.
“When you give so much but get so little in return, it’s unfair,” McCann said. “I just felt like I had (enough). Like that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was like, ‘I’m done.’”
Confined to a walking boot for the next three months, McCann laid back, took a couple vacations and opened a coffee shop called Moll & Joel’s Rolls. Although she was lifting and rehabbing her leg every day, she admittedly became “bitter” toward MMA and “couldn’t be around it.”
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McCann considered calling it a career, but her longtime coach Paul Rimmer sat down and had a conversation with her. It was a tough, but necessary one that McCann called “f***ing brilliant.”
“It wasn’t an easy conversation for either of us,” McCann said. “We were screaming at each other like, ‘I f***ing love you. I don’t want you to lose,’ and I was like, ‘I’ll show you. We gotta do it.’”
It wasn’t the first time Rimmer and McCann talked about the 34-year-old hanging it up. When McCann suffered her submission loss to Julija Stoliarenko in July 2023, McCann considered retirement, and it was Rimmer who pushed her toward making the move to 115 pounds.
“I’ll tell you when enough is enough,” McCann recalled Rimmer telling her ahead of her fight against Diana Belbita.
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That’s the kind of trust McCann has her in her Next Generation Liverpool coach, and if you know anything about her, it makes all the sense in the world that she would have that kind of relationship with those closest to her and her career.
So, the woman Rimmer refers to as “the hardest bird he knows” got back to work and got back into the gym. The journey was difficult, however. The injury was McCann’s first since the one that more or less ended her soccer career, so the apprehension was natural, but it didn’t take long to get back into that fighter-mode.
“When the boot came off and I was allowed to go back to the gym, I took my first kick, and I was like, ‘Oh, f*** it. I’m back,’” she said.
That was just the start, though. McCann said she needed to “dig in deep” to get back into fighting shape, joking that she almost retired a couple dozen times as she prepared for her bout in London.
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One person helping her get through “eight weeks of aching” was her teammate Nathan Fletcher, who also fights in UFC’s return to London against Caolán Loughran. Fletcher also suffered a broken leg when he competed on The Ultimate Fighter Season 32, and after pushing through it and making it to the scorecards, he got a call to the promotion later in 2024 at UFC Fight Night: Burns vs Brady. There, he locked up a second-round submission win, and he has been a big source of support for McCann working her way through the same injury.
“We share a lot more on the mental side on how do we come back from them injuries, how do we not feel scared anymore?” McCann said. “It's just nice to have someone, another teammate (who went through the same thing).”
On the flip side, McCann does what she can as the veteran, making sure he has everything packed and organized and booking somewhere to eat when it’s time. She is no stranger to the big sister role, particularly for Fletcher, whom she brought to Fight Island with her before her fight against Taila Santos so he could get a preview of what he hoped to come in a few years’ time. She complimented his demeanor, seeing a kindred spirit who is also “quite deep and stoic and philosophical.”
In a full-circle moment, Fletcher was in the crowd when McCann notched her first UFC win in 2018, and the two have enjoyed going through the fight week experience together seven years later.
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“It’s nice to see his eyes light up,” McCann said. “It’s nice to see someone living their dream. Some people never get to lace those gloves up once, and that is all they ever dream of doing, and he is living proof that it’s not always a straight road to the top. You can have losses, and even on that lower-level stage, have losses there, but still find a way to come up and come through. Big inspiration.”
McCann jokes that, if a movie was ever made about her life, the filmmakers might not know what to include because life has been such a ride. It’s one she has always accepted and worn with pride, but it’s also one that remains tough to weather, nonetheless.
Molly McCann Is Making A Difference With Weapons Down Gloves Up
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Molly McCann Is Making A Difference With Weapons Down Gloves Up
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She hopes to add another triumphant comeback to her story. In a turn of on-the-nose luck, she found out a week before her fight that, instead of fighting Istela Nunes, she would be facing someone completely new: Dana White’s Contender Series graduate Alexia Thainara.
The 34-year-old scouser can’t help but laugh.
“It makes for the biggest Molly McCann story you’ve ever heard in your life, doesn’t it? Like, ‘Oh, what else can we give her?’” she said.
That’s the fight game, but that’s also life for Molly McCann, and she welcomes it all the same. Overcoming challenges is something all fighters do to some degree, but McCann seems to find herself encountering a few more road blocks along the way.
Maybe she is, maybe she isn’t, but her openness in sharing all those speed bumps is why she is special.
“I won’t be remembered for the elbows or, ‘I just want a bevvy, lad,’” McCann said. “It’ll be for how I handled the losses and came back and won again because I don’t think there’s many people who could take the stick online, the mental (space) of where you go when you lose, and the grief, the grieving process and still turn up with a smile on your face trying to make the best out of the situation and enjoy what they got.”
She recalls a quote from American writer and activist Maya Angelou about encountering defeats but not being defeated.
For McCann, setbacks might have been necessary to bring the best out of her, and her vulnerability along the way have allowed people across the world to see what it means to rise out of those low times and thrive.
That is the Molly McCann story — or at least a part of it. Another chapter gets written on March 22.
UFC Fight Night: Edwards vs Brady took place live from O2 Arena in London, England on March 22, 2025. See the final Prelim & Main Card Results, Official Scorecards and Who Won Bonuses - and relive the action on UFC FIGHT PASS!
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