January 19 – Hands, feet, elbows, knees: Throughout her 12-year professional MMA career, Amber Brown has impressed her opponents with it all. She also defended herself against attacks from all of these attack points.
And yes, as an MMA fighter, she participates in clinches where she matches strength against strength at close range.
Transferring the above skills to Muay Thai, as Brown will do Saturday at Expo New Mexico, is simply the next stop on her martial arts journey.
She is thrilled by the view.
“I feel like it’s the right fit for me,” she said in a recent interview at Kingdom Muay Thai in Albuquerque. “It’s kind of weird that I’ve never really been interested in it before, (but) I just feel like it’s kind of my home and probably the place I should have been all along.”
For now, the ground game that is such an integral part of MMA is gone. Brown, 7-7 in the cage, has defeated opponents and been defeated. She has won battles by submission and lost by submission.
She won’t miss it.
“It will be nice to go out and just test my stand-up skills,” she said, “and not have to worry about being defeated.”
Brown last fought MMA in April 2023 – a unanimous decision loss to Marnic Mann on an LFA card in Prior Lake, Minnesota. Since then, she has remained busy supporting fellow fighters Tim Means and Brenda Gonzales Means with their wrestling program at Moriarty High School and helping her husband, boxing coach Joe Blake, with his business.
She didn’t miss 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 right now it’s all about Muay Thai.
“I just burned out on MMA,” she said. “I just felt like I was going around in circles, not getting fights, not training, doing the same thing every day, failing fights.”
After Blake began teaching boxing classes at Kingdom, she began training for Muay Thai there. When co-promoters Marc Entenberg and Ricky Kottenstette asked her if she would be interested in fighting on their upcoming card, “I was like, ‘Yeah, sure.’…So here we are.”
Brown’s scheduled opponent, Rebecca Watford of Denver, will enter the ring on the 25th with a huge advantage in experience. Although Muay Thai records are difficult to track, Brown believes Watford have staged at least 15 Muay Thai fights and won ten of them.
Undeterred, Brown believes she has essentially been training for Muay Thai since she first walked into Tom Vaughn and Arlene Sanchez-Vaughn’s FIT-NHB gym about 13 years ago.
“Arlene was very into Muay Thai training at the time, so she did a lot of things similar to what we do here (at Kingdom),” Brown said. “I have a certain basis there and have always loved hitting.”
About the duel with Watford she said: “She is a very talented opponent.”
Brown wouldn’t have wanted it any other way.
“It’s a perfect combination,” she said. “I’m thrilled.”