Woman vs. man in a bare-knuckle, no-rules fight? It happened, and the story behind it is a wild one

You see them standing there before it starts. A shirtless male kickboxer, idly checking his cup. A woman in a sleeveless shirt, clenching her bare fists and bouncing from foot to foot like she’s standing on a hot stove.

If you didn’t know better, you’d swear they were about to fight, this man and this woman. You’d also swear that this guy standing between them in a T-shirt that reads, ‘No Rules,’ was encouraging them to do so.

You’d be right, of course, and depending on your own personal sensibilities you’d probably also be fascinated or horrified by what comes next.

The woman is Ediane Gomes, who’s now 36 and a seven-year veteran of professional MMA. But back in 2007, when she showed up to fight a local male kickboxer for the now-defunct Rio Heroes organization, she was a reformed drug addict and former Sao Paolo street kid just trying to make some money.

And yeah, Gomes will tell you now, that’s mostly what it was about for her, was the money. She’d been trying to break into professional fighting but was having trouble getting a bout. A friend told her about the underground, bare-knuckle, no-rules operation that Rio Heroes was running, and also told her that she could make as much as $500 if she won. For Gomes, that was all she needed to hear.

“For me, fighting was survival,” Gomes told MMAjunkie, in her native Portuguese. “I came from the streets. I grew up fighting in the streets to survive. Imagine being paid for a change.”

Here’s what you have to understand about the Gomes who showed up that night in Sao Paulo: She was going through what she would later refer to as “a difficult period” in her life. Before she found jiu-jitsu, Gomes said, she was “a hardcore cocaine addict,” living on the streets.

“I was out of control,” Gomes said. “All I (could) think about was getting high, and getting into trouble out in the streets.”

It didn’t help that Gomes hadn’t exactly been dealt a great hand as a child. Her parents, she said, weren’t capable of raising her, so they gave her away.

“I was passed around as a child,” Gomes said. “Some took care of me, others didn’t, and others left me in the streets.”

Alex Davis, who would later become Gomes’ manager, recalled hers as a troubling, though not exceptionally uncommon story among poor children in Brazil.

“Her parents gave her to another poor family, then that family started having kids and they gave her away to a religious institute in Sao Paulo,” Davis said. “She ended up running away from that and she became basically a homeless street urchin. She fought. She cleaned windshields and shined shoes. She was really homeless, just scraping by.”

Back in those days, Gomes said, she never knew if she’d be dead or alive at the end of the day. It wasn’t until she found jiu-jitsu that her life changed for the better. That’s also about the time she got clean, after three months in a rehab clinic. That’s when she met Jorge “Macaco” Patino, who told Gomes that she must change her life or else lose it altogether.

“‘Macaco’ saw my potential,” Gomes said. “He was one of many people who helped me, so I could get away from drugs. I wouldn’t have made it without their help.”

But when Gomes headed off to Rio Heroes, she didn’t tell Patino. She was afraid, she said. She wasn’t sure he’d approve. At the same time, it wasn’t like her options as a female fighter in Sao Paulo were limitless. She’d traveled around Brazil for various jiu-jitsu tournaments, Gomes said, but attempts to book an actual MMA fight had fallen through at the last minute. When she heard about Rio Heroes, and about this fight against a man, it didn’t sound so bad. It also sounded like it might not be totally legitimate.

“When I was first told about it, it was my understanding that it wouldn’t be a real fight,” Gomes said. “I thought we’d be pretending to fight for a movie. I didn’t know that much about fighting. When I arrived, I found out this was for real. I wasn’t sure I should be doing it. Then I found out I could get 250 American dollars to fight and $250 more if I won. That’s a lot of money in Brazil. A lot of MMA events in Brazil just pay a fraction of that. I figured I’d make some money even if I lost.”

The man behind it was Jorge Pereira, who at the time had begun making a name for himself as the purveyor of an underground street-fighting scene, a return to the blood-and-guts days of Brazil’s vale tudo tradition just as MMA was starting to gain mainstream acceptance around the world. It’s Periera who can be seen in the video wearing the “No Rules” shirt, just in case there was any doubt about what the viewer is about to witness.

Though Rio Heroes would eventually be shut down by the authorities the following year, at the time the series was in “a pilot stage,” according to Pereira. It was controversial right from the start, and remained so until its demise. Even some fellow Brazilian fighters who had come up in the vale tudo scene alongside Pereira were against it.

“I saw it on TV, and I started to cry,” Wanderlei Silva told Sherdog.com, before warning that if nothing was done to halt Rio Heroes, “it will be the end of our sport.”

“The early Rio Heroes events were pilot episodes to gauge interest in what we were doing,” Pereira told MMAjunkie. “The cards had a greater intensity than established MMA, since we had no gloves and no time limits. We would always say ‘anything can happen.’ So we decided to book a woman against a man to prove that our promotion would truly break all barriers.”

One of those barriers, apparently, was record-keeping. Like Gomes, Periera doesn’t recall the name of the man who agreed to this unique fight, only that he was a local Muay Thai kickboxer and instructor who lacked even a basic knowledge of jiu-jitsu.

“He was certainly caught by surprise,” Pereira said. “The truth is, he had no idea how to fight on the ground.”

Of course, Gomes didn’t know that at first. Along with the other fighters, she showed up to the gym “after-hours” and waited for things to get started. She wasn’t sure what to expect, but as long as it ended with her being paid at least $250, she figured she could handle it.

Then Pereira brought her onto the mat opposite her opponent, surrounded by other competitors and spectators, many of them filming the action on their own cell phones. She was so excited she couldn’t stand still, yet she also had no idea exactly what was about to happen. Was she really going to fight a man? Was he really going to fight her back?

Then Pereira gave the signal, and it was on.

“In reality, at the start of the fight, he was just playing,” Gomes said. “He was going easy at first, to see what I had to offer. After I punched in, he kicked me hard on the thigh. My leg wobbled. Then I realized that he was trying to knock me out. I decided I needed to survive this. This was no game.”

It was after that kick to the thigh that Gomes got her first takedown of the fight. Once the fight hit the small square of thin blue mats on the floor, it didn’t take her long to realize that her opponent was lost on the ground. She moved quickly into full mount, then tried to attack with punches from the top position. But as her opponent covered up, Gomes found she couldn’t do much damage.

When her opponent rolled her over, she locked up a triangle choke from the bottom. Her opponent reacted the way most people would when caught in a choke he didn’t fully understand — he picked her up and slammed her down as hard he could. That’s about the time that Gomes started to worry.

“Some people thought that was fake,” she said. “There’s nothing fake about that guy picking me up and tossing me back down, hard. I landed on my spine. I could have broken my back. I thought he was crazy.”

By the time they both got back to their feet, the man was looking bloodied, a little tired, and more than a little concerned. The shouting from onlookers only got more urgent, voices crowding each other out until it was one unintelligible mass of sound. By this point, Gomes was committed. She felt like she was in a fight for her life, and it was a feeling she was not entirely unfamiliar with. She quickly got another takedown, and this time she resolved to learn from her earlier mistakes.

“I wasn’t sure I could punch him effectively since my hands were so small by comparison, so I decided to headbutt him,” Gomes said. “I knew I could hit him harder with my head, and open him up. He started panicking since he had no jiu-jitsu. That’s when I was able to isolate an arm.”

As Gomes straightened her opponent’s arm out, he gave a single tap. The room exploded with cheers. Even Pereira can be seen literally jumping for joy. Gomes settled for rolling over and giving the mat a slap, but inside, she said, “I was elated.”

“I had managed to get clean off drugs, fight a man, and win,” she said. “I had dreams of fighting jiu-jitsu on the world stage. It was also great to get the $250 to show and $250 to win. A lot of the Brazilian media made it seem like we were being exploited, but a lot of other competitions would literally pay nothing, by comparison. Maybe what I did wasn’t right, but at least we got paid.”

Her opponent, as one might imagine, wasn’t quite so pleased. He seemed to offer some tepid objection after the fight, she said, and she didn’t hear much from him after that. There was talk that he moved away, though Pereira insisted he thought no less of the Muay Thai practitioner who got armbarred by a woman.

“I have total respect for him, for taking that fight,” Pereira said. “…I’ve been asked if I was crazy to set up that fight. That’s true. I was crazy. I was crazy to have her fight against one man only. To make it fair, she should have fought two men.”

After the rush of victory had subsided for Gomes, then came the fear. She was afraid to tell her coach Patino what she’d done, but she was even more scared of lying to him. When she did tell him, Gomes said, he was upset, but mostly because he feared what it might do to her MMA career once word spread that she’d fought and defeated a man in a no-rules gym fight.

That fear, according to Davis, who later took her on as a client and helped Gomes get situated at Florida’s American Top Team gym, was not necessarily unfounded.

“What happened was, I’d try to get her a fight with some girl, but then that girl would look her up on the internet and see her whipping a guy’s ass and she wouldn’t want to fight her,” Davis said.

Once the video spread on YouTube, it brought Gomes a brand of fame that was difficult to distinguish from notoriety. People knew her now, but she wasn’t always sure it was what she wanted to be known for, and all before her career had even gotten off the ground.

Since then, life has changed dramatically for Gomes. She lives in Florida, training at ATT full-time. She’s married to a fellow Brazilian who grew up in the U.S. She has something resembling a relationship with the mother and father who gave her away, though it’s not a close one.

“At least I can speak to them now,” Gomes said. “Now I realize that they couldn’t give me what they didn’t have. You can’t expect love from someone who doesn’t know how to give it.”

Her most recent fight ended in a submission loss to Tonya Evinger at Invicta FC 8 in early September. It was her first defeat since getting armbarred by current UFC women’s bantamweight champ Ronda Rousey at a King of the Cage event in 2011. It was a blow to come out on the losing end. It always is, Gomes said, but it didn’t keep her down for long.

“After I lost I could hear a man’s voice in the crowd telling me I’m a good person,” Gomes said. “Often when I meet fans, they hug me. I’ve been told that even if we don’t speak the same language, they can tell I’m a good person. I’m treated very well in the United States. There’s no money in the world that can measure up to that.”

And the old days? The homelessness and abandonment? The drugs and the daily struggles for survival that marked her youth in Brazil? The whole miserable ordeal that led to that bare-knuckle brawl with a kickboxing instructor in a Sao Paulo gym? She hasn’t forgotten any of it, even if she now lives a life so different as to be almost unrecognizable.

“But sometimes memories still hurt,” Gomes said. “Only people who lived that crazy life may understand.”