At a glance, you'd probably never think there's anything to the woman who flashed her breasts at an entire arena after delivering a devastating jab-to-uppercut first-round finish. You know what I'm talking about if you were a combat sports fan in late 2022. It was the rare bare-knuckle boxing viral moment that buzzed loud enough to reach mainstream media. But that's all it looked like: A substanceless five minutes of fame from an attention-seeking unknown. In reality, it was simply Tai Emery being Tai Emery.
She's forged her own rules for 38 years.
Emery's win over Rung-Arun Khunchai marked her debut in BKFC, prompted conversations about fines ranging in the millions of Baht (Thailand's currency) — and was altogether one hell of a way to make a first impression to the combat world. Nearly three years later, after bare-knuckle detours in Japan and slap-fighting side roads in Dubai, Emery sits on the precipice of being able to call herself a champion. At BKFC 71 on Friday, Emery steps up to challenge BKFC's longtime strawweight titleholder, Britain Hart.
"For some people, it's like, 'I wanted to be the UFC champion.' But with these knuckles and just my life and what I've lived, I really feel like I truly am developed for this sport," Emery says. "I feel like somehow the universe has done everything, pulled every little thing. So the lead-up to the most special thing in my life, to me, this is my first child, you know? Other people are having babies. To me, getting this built is the same thing, where it's going to be this huge accomplishment."
A native New Zealander who was born in Queensland, Australia, before uprooting to Thailand and then Dubai, Emery has made it work through sheer perseverance in a way that defies the conventions of her unusual introduction to the combat masses. She slept on the mats when she first arrived at her old Thailand gym in 2020 before eventually upgrading to a mattress on the floor. It was like being a fish out of water — if that fish lived off a diet of a single rice cup and egg a day to get by. She recalls having only two pairs of training shorts, both of which she'd wash consistently for her two-a-day schedule, yet when the local cats urinate on your few pairs of clothes, the stench only magnifies a foreigner as an even larger sore thumb.
Humbling, sure, but humbling was Emery's life in a nutshell. The roots for her unorthodox brand of toughness, the kind needed to thrive in a grisly sport like bare-knuckle boxing, were dug early.
"It took me until I was an adult to realize not everyone would have candles [for light sources] inside their house," she says. "Our electricity wasn't always on. It took me a long time to even click with that, because I was a ...
