Roha Hudson: A New Beginning

Roha Hudson: A New Beginning

Post-fight interviews can vary significantly in their tone. The joys of a famous win. The tears of an unexpected loss. The difference between victory and defeat is so apparent when the words of a fighter start to flow.

Those words of a victorious fighter are easy to transcribe. The interview incredibly easy to conduct. But there is another side to the sport that many don’t see.

The demand for a fighter’s time pre-fight is often high. But should that fighter suffer a defeat, that demand for their time reduces significantly. They are often left alone to process their thoughts. The never-ending media outlets see little use for them in the immediate aftermath of a shock defeat. The winner is of far more interest to them it seems. The need for clicks carries more weight than a little bit of time and empathy for a defeated fighter.

I’ve done many a post-fight interview that has been insanely difficult. I’ll never forget my interaction with a broken Mikaela Mayer the morning after Alycia Baumgardner took away plenty in 2022. A fighter who couldn’t accept that she had been beaten the night before by her most heated rival. To be fair, she had more than a point. It was the start of what she would call her grieving period. Trust me, that was an extremely long process to get back what she had lost.

I was clumsy in those early interactions. Trying to find the right words when there weren’t any. A fighter in front of me in an empty deserted hotel foyer, and one who used to throw an endless stream of million-dollar quotes effortlessly at me. She was different. You couldn’t not feel her pain. It took time. Longer than even Mayer would have thought. But she got there.

I was reminded of that awkward conversation and many others last weekend. Roha Hudson made her long-awaited professional debut last weekend. Like Mayer against Baumgardner, Hudson would never have remotely considered that she would lose. Her opponent Poland’s Esta Konecna probably thought that she wouldn’t win. Konecna had probably resigned herself to another defeat on the road. It was seemingly her life in boxing. Any lingering ambitions had almost certainly long disappeared. The role of the journeywoman now deeply embedded in her thoughts.

But the pre-fight script wasn’t followed. Konecna beat Hudson over four rounds. The dream debut in front of her passionate vocal faithful was a disaster. Hard words. But that’s exactly what it was.

Like Mayer, I knew how Hudson would be feeling in the hours that followed. The bubbly fighter I had encountered previously would be replaced by a fighter who would be trying to find her thoughts. Trying to find herself. The reason for her defeat to a fighter who rarely wins. Hudson was unbeaten in the amateur ranks. National titles were won. Big dreams were hers as she signed her professional contract last year. Hudson was used to winning. Konecna was used to losing. I didn’t expect any drama. The standard 40-36 scorecard incoming. But very quickly, I knew this seemed different. Hudson knew before anyone else that it wouldn’t end her way.

Hudson could have suffered in silence. She didn’t need to do an interview with me the following morning. Maybe she shouldn’t have? We had agreed prior to a post-fight interview. But it wasn’t supposed to be like this. Hudson could easily have made her excuses to swerve an early morning therapy session with me.

I knew what I would find when we connected over Zoom. I knew the tears would flow. They did. And freely. You get emotionally invested in the fighters you speak to. You want what they want. You start to care. They are not just fighters. On the inside, they are like us, mere mortals.

Even in the despair of defeat. Hudson impressed me. There were no excuses. She opened up, looking for reasons why it had gone so badly wrong for her. But Hudson knew at the end of the day it was on her. Sometimes you have to go back, to move forward.

“At the end of the day, it was down to me. I just didn’t show up.” Hudson told me. She knew it all fell on her. A lesser person would have tried to lay the blame elsewhere. She didn’t. Sometimes you just have to own it.

A chest infection in the final weeks of her training camp and being on antibiotics didn’t help. Hudson was advised to pull out of the fight. She thought she could push through. But only doing three rounds of sparring in her entire fight was perhaps a bigger reason why she had lost. A crucial and time-tested requirement of a training camp where hindsight shouldn’t have been needed.

But Hudson and her team will learn. This doesn’t have to be the end of a dream. A new beginning can emerge from the horrors of last week in Coventry.

A week on Roha Hudson is getting there. She hopes that she will fight again in May. Hopefully, against Konecna. Make no mistake, Hudson wants to put what went wrong right. I expect a better fighter to emerge from the ashes of that shocking defeat. Hudson will demand it from herself. The next post-fight interview I sense will be different. The tears will flow again. But next time, they will be different. Victory tends to give you a different kind of emotion.

Photo Credit: GBM Sports