On Sunday my friend Vaughn and I decided to finish off the best weekend of the fall term by attending our other JET friend’s kickboxing fight. Meaghan had martial arts experience prior to coming to Okinawa, but joined a gym here a few months back. She had her first fight in September and, after watching the video of her knockout, I was really intrigued and hoped to attend the next match.
Vaughn and I fortunately arrived at the somewhat sketchy facility just after the doors opened. We got great general admission seats and sat through all sorts of interesting fights, saving our cheering for Meaghan, whose fight was the last before the Double Main Event (which was freakin’ awesome). Two-thirds of the crowd was military and they really got behind the white guy in each of the fights (they all happened to be American vs. Japanese). But they really got behind Meaghan.
[Meaghan was around 150lbs. a year ago; she had to get down to 114 for this fight]
Meaghan appeared to be winning, but, short of a knockout, neither Vaughn nor I know much about how fights are judged. At the end, the announcer read two of the three judges’ scores and Meaghan took them both, giving her the win.
[the extent of Meaghan's post-fight celebration]I haven’t gotten the details from her since the fight, but she told me last Thursday that if she won she would get her professional Japanese kickboxing license (there were apparently people in the crowd who came down from the mainland to observe her for this). The next step would be to have the organizing body fly a mainland fighter down to take her on in Okinawa and if she won that fight, she would then get flown to the mainland for fights. And of course she would be getting paid for all of this. How cool!
[how would you like your daughter to bring home either of these two guys? (the one on the left was a world champion from 2000-2004 in his category.)]
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