Sinead Kavanagh’s brutal road from turmoil and tragedy to MMA stardom

Few have watched their lives tilt from the centre and topple. Although it appears to happen in slowed time, there is little to stop the plunge when gravity takes hold.

A nudge one way and how easily it falls apart, with everything breaking and all that was imperfectly understood and unsteadily governed in pieces.

Apart from the confusion and fear, Sinead Kavanagh will say there is an unstoppable momentum about it and acceleration towards life's often preferred state of chaos. A domino falls.

She laughs quite a bit and cries too. Trying to explain the concept of living in Dublin in terms of survival, and endurance is not easy. Thriving is not part of the narrative, but how things can inexactly, finally fit together.

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There is an irony to having your head bleed or windpipe flattened in MMA being less violent than the unvarnished civilian world, where the cage, not the street, becomes the safe place.

'I went to the hospital the week before my Leaving Cert. They brought me in to induce me. I wanted to do my Leaving Cert. So I went back and done the Leaving a week after

Kavanagh’s life fell and fell badly. Now she’s up. She’s laughing. She’s crying. She is not broken. She’s got another shot.

“I had Leon when I was 17,” she says. “I went to the hospital the week before my Leaving Cert. They brought me in to induce me. I wanted to do my Leaving Cert. So I went back and done the Leaving a week after I had Leon.

“It wasn’t hard to do an exam. But in my own head… it was hard. Here I was like, I have a kid now. Like, you know, you are 17… you are in a dark place. It was in my head. It was like my life has ended. I have a son and fuck it all, fuck it, my dreams are over.”

Tragedy

Leon’s father was around. He was in his 20s. But as difficulty turned to tragedy, he died not so long after from natural causes. “He was just found,” she says gently, offering no explanation. “Natural. Alan. Alan Eccles was his name. Then it was like a domino effect.”

Right now, she is hoping she can rebound from last November's first round KO defeat to the best female MMA fighter in the world, Cris Cyborg. For that she has to beat a friend, Leah McCourt in Bellator 275 on February 25th in Dublin.

It is home soil for Kavanagh, a few miles from Inchicore, where her mother raised five children before facing her own catastrophe, which set off a train of events. Seriously injured in a car crash, her mother survived but her sister and brother, Sinead’s aunt and uncle, both died.

Following weeks in a coma, her mother pulled through, shattered. She then fell into medication as the family began to unravel, Sinead as a single mother and her sister Lindsay both became casualties and homeless, with Lindsay falling into drug addiction.

Sinead now lives in Ballyfermot with Leon. Lindsay moves between living in tents and hostels in Dublin’s city centre and continues to struggle with substance abuse.

'I was homeless. I was put in with addicts. Heroin and drugs were always around me. There was many times I wanted to go there and forget everything'

“It wasn’t an easy road,” she says. “I could have given up what I loved. With the young fella on my own, life was hard.

“I was homeless. I was put in with addicts. Heroin and drugs were always around me. There was many times I wanted to go there and forget everything. But there was a fire and a passion that kept me away from that.”

When the time came, Leon went to training with his mother from whatever accommodation they had landed, in the pram. Prior to that it had been karate, when she found boxing-club doors closed to girls.

World championships

But her ability earned a place on the Irish boxing team and in 2010 Kavanagh found herself at the world championships in Barbados on the same team as Katie Taylor, Alanna Murphy and Ceire Smith.

Beaten in the second round by China’s Li Jinzi, two years later she made it again on to the 2012 Irish team for a trip to the World Championships in Qinhuangdao.

A round of 64 exit there after defeat to Venezuela’s Carmona Francelis was no disgrace. But Kavanagh had become disillusioned with boxing.

“I packed up. I was just ready to leave. It’s terrible what goes on and people don’t see it. Rio was on national television. Imagine what goes on in other competitions. I couldn’t deal with boxing any more. With the politics… now you see what’s going on even more. I just couldn’t take any more of that.”

She fought as a middleweight for 10 years before John Kavanagh in Dublin's Straight Blast Gym (SBG) opened the MMA door. He looked at her and said if she was going to fight it would not be at 75 kg. He told her to knock off the kilos, that she was a featherweight.

“He sent me to a nutritionist,” she says. “He looked after me from day one. He got me to fight the best in the world. He’s such a top guy in my life. I’m so glad I met him. He took me to another level. I’ve met some beautiful people who have kept me on this road and he’s one of them.”

SBG was much more than a door opening into a world famous gym. The voice it gave to her, the pride and acceptance and the steady direction in a tangled life was as much a gift as learning a choke hold. The new sport at the age of 28 demanded routine and balance. By then, the infant had become an 11-year-old boy.

‘Beautiful soul’

“It wasn’t an easy road,” she says. “There was just something in me that kept me on a good pathway. I’ve a sister that’s on heroin and she was living in town in a tent. It’s sad because she’s a good person that went down the wrong path. Lindsay is her name. Lindsay Kavanagh. She’s a beautiful soul.

“Yes, she is still living that life. I’m just hoping one day she will come out of it. We tried to help. You can’t help them if they can’t help themselves.”

“She survived,” she says of her mother. “But her brother and sister died. Part of her also died in the accident. It was just hard, it was. Hard for her and you know she was going through her own shit and she couldn’t deal with it for years.

“She had a hard life. Fuck it, she didn’t mean what she done. She was sorry for it. That changed everything in our lives, that crash. She’s still alive. She’s an absolute legend.

“She was on medication and just trying to get ourselves through life itself, trying to keep her head afloat. It was rough times for all of us.”

For a while she lived in a house in Gardiner Street in Dublin’s north inner city. Vulnerable as a young single mother, she was also placed in Sonas House in Clondalkin. Sonas is a group guided by the fundamental goal of keeping women and children safe from domestic abuse.

Despite their efforts, she did not have a good experience there.

“I was there for three years,” she says. “It was like a special… houses of women but the women were badly damaged on heroin and robbing each other all the time. That was probably the worst place I was ever in. I had a house with Leon. He was always with me.

“I was very young and I wasn’t in that frame of mind of doing heroin. But it was all around me. Something was there that had me not doing it. It was always with me constantly.

‘Auras and spirits’

“I believe in auras and in spirits and I do think there was someone around me not to let me go down that path. I’d say about six years it (her homelessness) lasted. Six years into my mid 20s.”

She has kicked back now, relaxed, she says. She believes the 30s bring their own healing powers. You can learn to let everything go and you get over “your bad stuff”. The weight of the world and the things in her head that she says “constantly pulled her down” are no longer there.

“I’ve let everything go,” she explains. “Forgive, forget. Well, you can’t forget. But I’m more mellow.”

In the fight against Cyborg last November, she had her eye socket broken. But she's lucky, she says. She didn't need to undergo surgery

Kavanagh left boxing in 2014 but wishes she had done it sooner and given MMA some of the better years of her youth. Now it gives her purpose, the will to get up and go to the gym and continue to train twice a day.

In the fight against Cyborg last November, she had her eye socket broken. But she’s lucky, she says. She didn’t need to undergo surgery. A metal plate in her face would have marked the end of a career. She’s hoping for five more years in the sport, some more “nice fights” and maybe even another shot at a title.

Leon loves it. He doesn’t ever want his mother to give up. He’s 18 years old now, a number one fan pouring over the fights and telling her what to do.

“The Cyborg fight, I’ve nothing to be ashamed about,” she says. “She is the best in the world. I went out to win. I’m the only girl who went out to win and hit her a few times and I rocked her. This fight will bring me back to where I want to be.

“When you lose a fight, it puts something in you. You want it more and you are going to make sure the next fight you are going to win. You don’t want to be on a losing streak. It’s hard when that happens.

‘We’ll hug and kiss later’

She says of her friend Leah, against whom she has to fight at Bellator 275: “Leah, yeah we train together. For a few years now. She’s a nice girl. But that’s the way it is. Like we knew this was going to come. Everything is put into the fire. We’ll hug and kiss after. It’s a fight that we will talk about in years to come. We need to do this. It’s on. I’m loving it.”

The name of the woman who helped engineer her current accommodation was Katie, she says. She was elderly at the time and noticed a struggling young woman with a child, who was not aimless, not dissolute and trying to make the best of what little she had.

“She saw something in me,” says Kavanagh.

In her she saw a defiant spirit and a point of difference, a determination not to become some kind of cliched extinction event. She stayed away from the kind of toxic love affairs to which her sister and mother were drawn and Katie saw it, told them she would get them out and she did. That’s when they moved to Ballyfermot.

“I’ve thought about it. I am afraid of what’s next,” she says. “It’s all been, you know like, fighting. People are telling me, when they heard my story, I’d be a motivational speaker. I don’t see that.

“I’m just glad that I survived and came out of it, being who I am. I couldn’t talk about it. I couldn’t talk about my past because I was still going through it. For many years. You are walking around with this in your head and you are unable to share. Then when you talk you are letting the tears go. You are letting the anger go.”

She is laughing now. There are tears again. They are not angry but the spillover of a brutal journey, at 35 years of age the realisation of beating odds, tilting and toppling and plunging but emerging.

“A warrior,” she says. “I do feel I am a warrior. That’s how I feel.”

She has had to be, otherwise the last domino to fall.