She may not be allowed inside a bar yet, but Maycee Barber is already turning heads in the combat sports world.
The 20-year-old has enjoyed a glittering start to her career inside the cage, winning her first six professional fights, including an explosive KO to begin her UFC career.
Barber dropped jaws after bloodying Hannah Cifers at UFC Fight Night 139 in November last year, unleashing a horrific ground-and-pound attack to stain the ring.
She immediately walked up to UFC president Dana White and demanded she get a bonus for her display on the night. It was clear the youngster wasn’t your average debutant.
The cocky Colorado product revealed just how upfront she was with her new boss as she slid into the UFC mix in the lead-up to her next conquest inside the Octagon.
“I told him that I was gonna be as big, if not bigger than Conor McGregor and Ronda Rousey and all of the stars he has,” Barber said in an interview with MMA Fighting. “I am one of his next big stars. There aren’t very many right now, especially females. And I fit that perfectly. Just in terms of the person I want to portray in terms of the sport, I feel like I could fill that.”
The strawweight destroyer admitted she keeps a clock with a timer set to when she turns 23 and eight months — the same age Jon Jones was when he became the promotion’s youngest ever champion.
For Barber, failure is out of the question.
“I decided that I knew exactly what I was gonna do with my life and my career in terms of martial arts,” Barber said. “Either I was gonna fight or if fighting wasn’t gonna work out for me — which, if I put my mind to something, it usually works out — that was what my life was going to be, martial arts. I don’t need a college degree, because I already had all the education I needed and I was continuing the education. That’s what I wanted to do with my life.”
And she appears to love the limelight. Often athletes can feel the burden of media obligations weighing their performance down. For this 20-year-old, it’s all part of the game.
“I hear a lot of people complaining about how much they hate interviews or how much they dread taking pictures,” Barber said. “But I mean, that’s the sport we chose. That’s what comes with it. And if you want to be successful in something, you have to be all-in. You’ve gotta just learn to enjoy life just the way it is. And enjoy every little bit of it.”
Despite publicly announcing her plan to usurp him as the UFC golden child, Barber appears to have a lot of love for McGregor, heaping praise on the Irishman’s near-instant, monolithic rise from Dublin cage fighter to international multimillionaire.
“McGregor did it right,” she said. “If he’s gonna fight, if he’s gonna be a public figure, he might as well be the best one he can possibly be. And he’s doing it, right? Why would I be any different?”