The remarkable comeback story of UFC fighter Jessica Eye

The day Jessica Eye decided she’d never go home again was her 26th birthday.

She remembers that it was a warm Saturday afternoon in July, three weeks before her next MMA fight. Her father, Randy, always hosted family and friends on weekends at home, a one-story ranch house on 5 acres of northeast Ohio woodland. The flock would idle outside at the picnic bench or in folding chairs in the yard while her dad tended to his fish fry or tenderloins.

For this particular gathering, Randy’s partner, Michelle, had made Jessica a “fruit cake” to celebrate. Not a true confection but a tiered tower of actual fruit made to look like a cake — watermelon and pineapple and grapes, with a sprinkling of baby marshmallows — because she was a professional fighter in the heart of training camp and thus couldn’t afford any guilty dietary pleasures, birthday or no birthday.

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As everyone congregated — her family and friends, a few kids, even some sponsors Eye was courting for her still-budding MMA career — her father started to smoke marijuana. With those kids and sponsors nearby, she asked if Randy could do it away from the crowd. He agreed, then walked to the front yard.

What came next is a fog. Eye recalls bits and pieces — thin, jagged rays of daylight that escape the dense cloud cover of her memory. She followed him to the front. She thanked him for doing what she’d asked. He turned angry, on a dime, and screamed at her: “Don’t tell me what to do on my own lawn!” He reared back. He punched her in her face, putting the full force of his bulk — all 260 pounds and 6 feet, 5 inches — into that blow. She fought back. She lunged at him. She kneed him in his stomach. Her older brother, also named Randy, jumped between them. As Jessica ran to her car, she thought, “For the first time, I f—ing hit him back. I got him.” She thought, not for the first time, “This is the last time I’m coming back.”

That summer day in 2012 wasn’t Eye’s first brush with her father’s violence. It was the first moment she felt bold enough to respond to it with violence of her own. She was a professional fighter by then. Violence was her trade. Her hands were weapons too.

As she sped away from her father’s house, her adrenaline seeping out like air hemorrhaging from a balloon, she felt hollow, deflated. That’s when she remembered that Sunday, the very next day, she was due to visit the Cleveland Browns’ training camp, to join a friend, wide receiver Josh Cribbs, for a workout. She’d have to show up with a fresh, blooming bruise under her right eye.

“Any other time, I’m proud to talk about my bruises, to wear them,” she says now, seven years removed from that black eye. “But this one didn’t feel right.”

There’s another bruise, this one fading and on its way out — soft purple and a little yellow in spots — just above Eye’s right cheekbone, one more token of her chosen path.

“Occupational hazard,” she shrugs.

It’s early May 2019, exactly four weeks before the biggest fight of her professional life, a title bout against flyweight bulldozer Valentina Shevchenko at UFC 238 on June 8 in Chicago. Eye considers her path — an abusive father, a terrible accident as a teenager, a four-fight UFC losing streak that threatened her career — and insists she always trusted she’d wind up here, on the cusp of a UFC championship. That doesn’t mean it has been easy. That doesn’t mean she never wavers. She is dead center on the mat of an octagon, legs tucked beneath her, head tilted just the slightest bit downward, in the fetal position. She’s beat.
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