Does fighting mix with parenting? Paddy Pimblett and others juggle the demanding challenge

Picture this: Paddy Pimblett, 29, unbeaten as a lightweight in the UFC, is handed two infants to care for in between training sessions ahead of his July 27 bout at UFC 304 in Manchester, England.

The infants are his twin daughters, Betsy and Margot, still only a few months old. And these periods in which he alone is responsible for them are relatively brief. We’re talking maybe 20 or 30 minutes while his wife Laura gets the shortest of respites. But still.

This is a man who, since his teenage years, has focused all his attention and energy on learning how to fight people in a cage. He is not exactly experienced in the delicate art of caring for babies. And two of them? At the same time?

“Sometimes they’re both screaming and I’m just like, what am I meant to do?” Pimblett told Yahoo Sports. “It’s very difficult.”

But Pimblett is very lucky. He’s not waking up in the middle of the night to feed these twins, interrupting his sleep or cutting into his recovery time between workouts. A lot of times, he doesn’t even stir from dreamland when the girls are bawling in the wee hours. Laura handles all baby duties, giving Pimblett essentially a free pass through those dark nights of the soul that often accompany the very early stages of parenthood.

“To be honest, I'm sleeping well when I go to sleep,” Pimblett said. “I’m like Sleeping Beauty, lad. I am just out for the count. Laura says it to me some nights, ‘Did you not wake up when they were both screaming?’ I'm like, 'Nah, were they both screaming?'”

There are a lot of ways in which parenthood seems incompatible with the life of a pro fighter. An old adage of the fight game tells us that fighters have to be selfish. They must prioritize their training, their rest, their career. But ask most parents and they’ll tell you, the years when their children were young and needy were probably not the most athletically fit times of their lives.

Historically, fighters have handled this conflict in a couple different ways. One popular choice is to hand off the bulk of the duties to a partner or co-parent, as Pimblett has done. If domestic bliss is to be maintained, this requires having a certain kind of partner or co-parent. Understandably, not everyone wants to shoulder the bulk of that heavy load for weeks or months at a time, so Pimblett counts himself lucky that he has such a partner.

“Laura, she hasn't asked nothing from me,” Pimblett said. “She knows that fight camp’s a very, very tough time and I need to be 100 percent in it. Everything's got to be about training and sleeping and stuff like that. So she understands that. She's been with me since I was 15, 16. She's been here for the whole time. She's been here since I was fighting amateur, since I was fighting at a low level, Cage Warriors, now the UFC. She’s been by my side the whole time, so she knows exactly what I've got to do and she has picked up so much of the slack. Like, an unbelievable amount.”

'I wouldn’t want to leave my kids completely'

Another approach that’s been tried over the years is the training camp disappearing act. Some fighters jet off to other cities to prepare for bouts. Sometimes they seek the refuge of a remote cabin, far away from all distractions and domestic responsibilities. Those iconic montages of Rocky Balboa training in the Russian wilderness before his fight with Ivan Drago? One thing he’s definitely not doing in between makeshift weight sessions and jogs through the snowy forest is cutting the crusts off sandwiches for the young son we see early in the film.

Former UFC heavyweight Ben Rothwell, who’s now undefeated in three fights with Bare Knuckle FC, said he’s tried both approaches. Only once did he leave home for a training camp, and that was partly to help him acclimate to the elevation in Denver prior to a bout there. That proved hard enough with one child, he said. Now with two kids, it feels like too much to ask of his wife, Jen.

“I think every person just has a different situation,” Rothwell said. “I remember hearing guys like Anderson Silva would completely hand off to mom. I don’t have that, but I wouldn’t want to leave my kids completely anyway.”

Still, Rothwell added, each time he signs on for a new fight it means the share of household responsibilities is about to shift — and both he and Jen know it.

“The stress kicks in when I get that call,” Rothwell said. “(Jen) said when I sign (to fight), she just goes, ‘F***.’”

Former UFC middleweight champ Chris Weidman once had a memorable exchange with rival Luke Rockhold, who suggested that having a wife and family might be more of a distraction than anything else.

“I see people with families and I see how it takes away, the fight game is different than any other sport,” Rockhold said back in 2016. “It's not the same as anything else. You've got to consume yourself. You got a training camp, and I put so much into it, I don't have any energy for anything but recovery and training and focusing on what's next. If you have a big family, it's going to take away from your objective.”

Weidman, who at the time was preparing for a rematch with Rockhold after losing his title to him the previous year, pushed back on those comments, saying his family “motivate me more than anything to train hard every day, knowing they're depending on me to take care of them and to provide for them.”

A couple years later, looking to rebound from a losing streak, Weidman considered changing up his training camp environment. Motivated by a different Rocky movie (“Rocky III,” where the title character realizes success has made him soft), he initially planned to move back into his parents’ basement during camp, leaving his children behind to recreate the environment he’d had at the start of his career.

Just before leaving, he changed his mind and decided to stay, but move into the guest room attached to his own garage. That would give him space from the cozy domestic life, he reasoned, while still keeping him close for his kids.

“I had an emotional breakdown,” Weidman said in 2017. “I started tearing up. I got to the top with my family.”

The irreplaceable value of a supportive partner

Not all fighting parents have the luxury of deciding whether to leave or stick around. Consider the recently retired Michelle Waterson-Gomez, for instance. Her daughter Araya was born in 2011, just as her career was beginning to take off. Waterson-Gomez fought twice that following year, becoming the Invicta FC atomweight champion in 2013.

Throughout that time, she was also raising a young child. Handing her daughter off for long periods in order to allow herself to focus simply wasn’t an option, especially since, as with many babies who become accustomed to breastfeeding early on, she wouldn’t take milk from a bottle.

“So I would wake up super early in the morning when she was still sleeping to get my cardio in, and that's when my husband would watch her,” Waterson-Gomez said. “When I'd come back, he'd go to work and then she kind of was just like my little road dog. She came with me everywhere I went. So when I went to training, it was me, my training bag, my purse, my baby, and my diaper bag. I trained and she kind of just stayed in the car seat and then if she got hungry or she started crying, one of my teammates that wasn't training would pick her up until I could come feed her. Then I’d come back and continue training.”

Here, too, the value of having a supportive partner became very clear. Her husband, Joshua Gomez, gave up his own boxing career for a regular job that would give the family more financial stability. As he told me back in 2014, that decision made sense “because Michelle is a hundred times better fighter than I ever was.”

Still, the lifestyle of a professional fighter demanded certain sacrifices, and at times that meant everyone in the family sacrificed along with her.

“It wasn't always easy, because I would probably say 80 percent of the time I took fights right in the middle of very important dates, like my daughter's birthday or someone’s wedding,” Waterson-Gomez said. “And we had to skip those things. We had to have semi-healthy Thanksgivings because of fight camp and stuff. And I think it's important for our kids to see the sacrifices that we make because one thing my dad always taught me is that actions speak louder than words. We can tell our children all we want that they can strive for greatness and be whatever they want in life. But until they see their parents striving for their own goals, I don't know if it's something that they can really put into context.”

Waterson-Gomez retired in June, after over 17 years as a pro, nearly a decade of which was spent in the UFC. One thing she learned about making a career in this sport as a parent, she said, was the value of patience.

“Something that might take somebody else a year or two to achieve if they're trying to climb the ladder or if they're trying to fight for a specific belt, that might take you as a mother twice as long,” Waterson-Gomez said. "Stay patient, but also stay hungry. If that's still something that you want, go after it.”

As for Pimblett, he’s still figuring out what life as a pro fighter is like with kids at home. As he prepares to fight King (formerly Bobby) Green in the wee hours of the morning at UFC 304 in Manchester, where fighters are looking at an unconventional start time in order to accommodate the UFC’s pay-per-view schedule in North America, it’s possible that a few baby-induced wakeup times wouldn’t be the worst thing.

But mostly, he said, what he’s learned so far is a different level of admiration for the woman who’s making it possible for him to sleep through the night.

“I can't put into words the way that … the fact that we've had twins and she's just making it look easy,” Pimblett said. “I've got a newfound respect for women, to be honest.”