Lauren Murphy knows who she is after a decade in the UFC — and her final fight is one last chance to show it

All those years ago, back when she stepped into an MMA cage for the first time, Lauren Murphy had a question she wanted to answer. It’s the whole reason she was even there to begin with, at a small regional event in Alaska, where she grew up.

“I wanted to find out how tough I was,” Murphy told Uncrowned this week. “I was like, 'I wonder if I could be in a fist fight and handle it?' That’s it. I’ve never been in a fight outside the cage. Literally why I started the sport was to find out how tough I could actually be.”

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A little over three years later she was undefeated as a professional and had captured the inaugural 135-pound title with the all-female MMA organization Invicta FC. So yeah, pretty tough, as it turns out.

But now Murphy is 41 years old and closing in on the end of her MMA career. Her fight against Eduarda Moura on the undercard of Saturday’s UFC Nashville event will be her last, according to Murphy, regardless of the outcome. It comes more than two years after her last trip into the Octagon — a unanimous decision loss to Jessica Andrade at UFC 283, which was only Murphy’s second defeat in this decade.

On an occasion like this, facing the end of something, one almost can’t help but get a little reflective. Murphy has been a professional fighter for the better part of 15 years now. What started as a personal test became a career and, to some extent, an identity. She’s lived an entire life in this sport, which is one of the reasons she doesn’t particularly care what kind of sendoff she gets from the UFC or its fans.

“I don't need anybody's validation to know what kind of career I've had,” Murphy said. “They don't know my entire story, they don't know where I come from. They don't know the fears that I had or the way that I was brought up. They don't know the things that I've really overcome to be where I'm at. For me, I'm very, very proud of my career and I don't need anybody's validation to feel that way. I don't need anybody's permission to feel good about what I've done, because I know how hard I've worked. I know the things that I've overcome to be here. I know that to go from Alaska to Invicta to the UFC, and then spend most of my career in the UFC, the odds were so f***ing slim. And I made it anyway, so I'm very proud of the way that I played the hand I was dealt. I think I played it really, really well.”

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That sense of inner peace didn’t always come so easy. When she first got to the UFC, Murphy admitted, she struggled with a kind of imposter syndrome. She looked around at the other fighters, some of them former Olympians who’d seemingly spent their entire lives as elite athletes, and wondered if she belonged.

She also had to learn how to deal with being a public figure, subject to the scrutiny of everyone with a television or a laptop, many of whom felt totally comfortable reaching out over social media to let her know what they thought her deficiencies might be.

“When the fans would write mean stuff to me on Twitter or something, I would take it so personal,” Murphy said.

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One time she was at a UFC meet-and-greet event with fans in Houston, she said. A man waited in line to get his picture with her and get her signature on some piece of MMA memorabilia.

“And then he was like, ‘Oh my God, I’m such a fan. Do you know I talked so much s*** to you on Twitter one time and you actually responded?’” Murphy said. “My mouth dropped open. I was like, 'Are you serious? You talked to s*** to me on Twitter and then stood in line to get my autograph?' I couldn’t understand that.”

It reminded her of something that former UFC champ Benson Henderson had told her in the gym once, she said. How the same fans who love to hate you online will be the ones who can’t wait to meet you in person. How they’ll never miss one of your fights, simply because now they’re emotionally invested.

It made her realize that, as personal as it felt on her end, to many fans it was just a game, part of the appeal of following a sport like this. They get to see the fighters laid bare, their emotions raw and visible in the cage on fight night. They form emotional connections, both good and bad. Then they know where to find you on the internet, whether or not they know how to act like decent people after that.

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These are the kinds of things she never thought she’d learn from fighting in a cage. That’s the funny part, she said, how you start out trying to answer one question about yourself and end up learning so much you never expected.

Take, for instance, how UFC flyweight champion Valentina Shevchenko taught her the value of focus and hard-earned confidence when Murphy challenged her for the 125-pound championship back in 2021.

“A bomb could have gone off in that arena and she wouldn’t have even blinked,” Murphy said. “She was so focused and so confident, and that can be scary just by itself. That was the biggest thing she taught me. She didn’t have to talk or say anything. You just felt it, like holy s***. I learned that if you can bring that focus and intensity and confidence into the fight, it’ll break people. They can feel it. Everybody else in the top 10, you can back them up, make them flinch, hear them breathing hard. But not her. It was a stark contrast to everyone else in the division, and that’s why she’s the champ.

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"t was a good lesson for me to see how that focus and confidence, it has to be earned and cultivated, and then you can use it in your fights.”

When the UFC first offered her Moura for her final fight, Murphy had never heard of her opponent. When she looked into it and saw a younger fighter just beginning to make her way in the UFC, not to mention the current BetMGM odds that have Murphy as about a 4-to-1 underdog, she could see what matchmakers were thinking.

Take a fighter on the way out and use her to boost a fighter on the way in. Murphy has been in this game long enough to know what the UFC's plans were.

“But I didn’t care,” she said. “I’ve been the underdog for most of my career. That stopped bothering me years ago.”

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For now her focus is on going out on a win. She’s been through all the ups and downs of life in the UFC enough times to know how it can make all the difference.

“When you win and you go out with your team after, the food tastes better. The jokes are funnier. Everything — life — just feels sweeter then,” Murphy said.

That’s what she’ll miss most when the ride is finally over after Saturday. There are other parts she won’t miss, like seeing her name in clickbait headlines or doing interviews for stories that end up leading with close-up images of her getting punched in the face.

“But the thing I’ll really miss is standing there getting my hand raised, hearing [UFC announcer] Bruce Buffer say ‘winner by whatever, 'Lucky' Lauren Murphy, I love that part,” she said. “It’s just an amazing feeling. You look up, see your name in lights all over the arena, and it’s just … there’s nothing like winning a UFC fight, man. You feel like, 'I did it. I really did it.'”

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Saturday night in Nashville, she gets one more chance to feel that feeling. And the fact that the oddsmakers (and likely many of the fans) don’t expect her to, she said, well, that seems like maybe the most fitting note to end on.