Jan. 19—Hands, feet, elbows, knees: during her 12-year professional MMA career, Amber Brown has struck her opponents with all the above. She’s defended herself against strikes from all those points of attack as well.
And, yes, she’s engaged in clinches — matching strength against strength in close quarters — as an MMA fighter.
Transferring the above skills to Muay Thai, as Brown is scheduled to do on Saturday at Expo New Mexico, is simply the next stop in her combat-sports journey.
She’s excited at the prospect.
“I feel like it’s kind of right up my alley,” she said in a recent interview at Albuquerque’s Kingdom Muay Thai. “It’s kind of weird that I never really had an interest in it before until now, (but) I really just feel like it’s kind of my home and it’s probably where I should have been all along.”
Gone, for now, is the ground game that’s such an integral part of MMA. Brown, 7-7 in the cage, has taken down opponents and been taken down. She’s won fights by submission and lost by submission.
She won’t miss it.
“It’ll be nice to go out there and just test my skills in standup,” she said, “and not have to worry about being taken down.”
Brown last fought MMA in April 2023 — a loss by unanimous decision to Marnic Mann on an LFA card in Prior Lake, Minnesota. Since then, she’s stayed busy by assisting fellow fighters Tim Means and Brenda Gonzales Means with their Moriarty High School wrestling program and by helping her husband, boxing coach Joe Blake, with his business.
She hasn’t missed MMA as much as she might have expected. If the right opportunity presented itself in MMA, Brown said, she wouldn’t turn it down. But for now, it’s all about Muay Thai.
“I just kind of got burnt out on MMA,” she said. “I just kind of felt I was running around in circles, not getting a fight, training, doing the same stuff every day, fights falling through.”
Then, after Blake began teaching boxing classes at Kingdom, she began training there for Muay Thai. When co-promoters Marc Entenberg and Ricky Kottenstette asked her if she’d be interested in fighting on their upcoming card, “I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’ … So here we are.”
Brown’s scheduled opponent, Denver’s Rebecca Watford, will enter the ring on the 25th with a vast edge in experience. Though Muay Thai records are difficult to track, Brown believes Watford has had at least 15 Muay Thai fights, winning 10 of those.
Undaunted, Brown believes she essentially has been training for Muay Thai since she first walked into Tom Vaughn and Arlene Sanchez-Vaughn’s FIT-NHB gym some 13 years ago.
“Arlene was real heavy into Muay Thai coaching at the time, so she did a lot of stuff similar to what we do here (at Kingdom),” Brown said. “So I have kind of a base in that, and I’ve always loved striking.”
Of the matchup with Watford, she said, “She’s a very skilled opponent.”
Brown wouldn’t have it any other way.
“It’s a perfect matchup,” she said. “I’m excited.”
