Promoted to the Front Page by Anton TabuenaWhen Eric Kelly enters the cage to fight Mitch Chilson at ONE Fighting Championship the size of the purse on offer will be the furthest thing from his mind. The Filipino, who has a perfect professional MMA record of 5-0, knows that a win over the unbeaten hometown hero on a show which is being broadcast to a potentially unprecedented viewing audience would make him an instant celebrity.
For the URCC Featherweight champion from Baguio, it is a far cry from the days when fighting was very much about the fortune, rather than the fame. Like so many of the best fighters in history, Kelly’s journey into martial arts began more from financial necessity than the desire to take up a new hobby.
At 20 years old and with employment prospects looking distinctly bleak he decided becoming a boxer would be the best available career move.
"I never went to college so I started boxing because I needed to make money. I won my first boxing match but then I started doing Wushu as well. I did good at Wushu so they picked me for the Philippines team to represent the country and I won the gold medal at the SEA Games," he said.
After five years of Wushu, a Chinese martial art which also encompasses wrestling and some grappling techniques, Kelly sustained a serious injury and was unable to compete or train for almost 18 months.
When he returned to action, he decided to join some friends who were doing something broadly similar to Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, although as Kelly explains it is difficult to trace the actual lineage of the techniques.
"I started learning the ground game in 2006, I just learned with my friends. We just roll together and we go to other gyms and just play. I don’t know where everyone learns from, they just know it!"
Wherever Kelly’s friends and training partners picked up their knowledge from, the source was clearly sound as he has submitted every single fighter he has ever faced since making his MMA debut in 2009.
Kelly is now 29, meaning that he is something of a late starter to the sport of MMA. However he has made up for lost time by string together a series of first round submission victories, four of them by rear naked choke. His last fight was for the vacant URCC Featherweight belt and it took less than three minutes before Nate Flores was forced to tap out or risk losing consciousness with Kelly’s forearm and bicep wrapped firmly around his throat,
"All my wins have been by submission, I really enjoy the ground game. Winning the URCC Featherweight belt in November was very important for me because that was my stepping stone to One Fighting Championship."
It will be the first time that Kelly has fought outside of the Philippines and there will be a number of factors against him. He has never been inside a cage before and will also have to potentially deal with the hostility of a hometown crowd who will be cheering for Singapore based Mitch Chilson.
Chilson and Kelly actually have much in common, they both started competing in MMA relatively late in life (Chilson is 33) and they are both unbeaten. The bookmakers have this fight as dead even and it is expected to be one of the closest contests of an extremely competitive looking ten fight card at ONE Fighting Championship.
It will be a voyage into the unknown for Kelly, who would like to secure the same sort of fanbase that another Baguiao native, the hugely popular Eduard Folayang, has,
"All my fights have been for the URCC this is my first time fighting internationally and my first time fighting in the cage. I don’t know whether that will make a difference or not, I guess I will find out! I have been trying to practice and we have a side of a cage which I can use. I train with Eduard sometimes, I’m proud to be representing the Philippines and I hope I can make some more fans there after this fight."
Kelly is a truly diverse mixed martial artists. As well as training in Wushu and a Filipino style of ground fighting which apparently has no name, he is also an expert in Yaw Yan, a form of kickboxing unique to the Philippines.
Yaw Yan was invented by a Filipino called Napoleon Fernandez and is slightly similar to Muay Thai although there is more emphasis on fighting from range, which should make it an extremely useful stand up base for mixed martial arts. Kelly also trains in the Indonesian martial art of Pencak Silat and says simply that he ‘likes martial arts’ and describes himself as a freestyle fighter.
It is an intriguing and potentially unique mixture of styles which will be being displayed to an enormous crowd in Singapore on Saturday night. The 12,000 capacity Singapore Indoor Stadium is virtually sold out with only a handful of tickets for the upper balconies available, and people all over the world, including the Philippines, will be watching on an online stream.
The size of the occasion is testament to how rapidly Kelly has progressed in just over two years as a professional mixed martial artist. With less than 48 hours until fight night he is calm and composed but stops short of speculating on the actual outcome,
"I know there will be a lot of people watching and I am very excited about that. I don’t have any prediction we will just see what happens."