Hi there,
I signed up to this forum because I wanted to share my story with a wide audience of people I don't personally know and get their honest opinion about what recently happened to me. English is not my native language so you could find some sentences being a bit "off", I apologize in advance. So, here's the story:
I'm 25 years old, I've been practicing kickboxing since I was 11 and jiu-jitsu since 2014. I never really competed until 2015. I've always been pretty good at kickboxing and when I started entering tournaments and stuff I always did very very well in increasingly bigger circuits.
Key point of the story: I kinda have a "nemesis", a girl one year younger than me who joined my gym a bunch years ago and with whom, for some reason, I immediately developed a bitter rivalry. We really couldn't stand each other and hard spars sometimes became proper fights. Once we even got in a fight in the locker room, and another time we really beat each other up on the lawn outside the gym, with the end result of both of us going to the hospital. I am pretty ashamed of that since I am usually a mellow and friendly person who never gets into fights or whatever! After that incident I was ready to leave the gym but she did it even before me. But when I began competing, she crossed my path again in a bunch of occasions.
We fought 4 times, in real matches, like it should be. The first three times I got two decisions and we had a draw. The fourth time, things went differently. Clearly, it was the most important match of all because the stage was quite bigger than the previous times. Early in the fight I felt very confident and I managed to give her a really hard time. It came to a point I hit her hard a couple of times and she looked stunned and was noticeably slowing down. When I saw her like that I decided I had to KO her and recklessly started throwing everything I got at her. Next thing I knew, they were waking me up and asking me if I was alright. She knocked me out cold. They told me she hit me with two right hooks in a row that stunned me, then KOd me with a kick. There is a video recording of that match but I never wanted to watch it.
I lost a bunch of times before, and I was TKOd once, but I've never been KOd in such a brutal fashion, and especially by my "arch-enemy" during a match I was clearly winning. The physical damage is now gone, but since that day I kinda lost a bit of my confidence and my grit...
I know there are some controversial aspects in this story, especially regarding my behavior outside the ring, but as I said I came here to get honest opinions about this whole story. THanks a lot.