Phaidra Knight, rugby great, set for pro MMA debut at 50: 'All roads lead to where I am'

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After 35 US caps, three World Cups and hall of fame recognition, the former flanker is still a fighter – but now it's in the octagon, for money

Phaidra Knight is already a pioneer, the only African American woman in the World Rugby Hall of Fame. In 2017, when she retired after three World Cups and 35 US caps, she was 43. Now she's 50 but on Saturday night in Patchogue, New York, she will claim another first: the oldest woman ever to make her pro MMA debut.

"All roads lead to where I am," Knight says, by phone from New York, on her way to training, with a sort of fierce zen sentiment familiar from conversations about rugby, the game she found at law school, through which she found herself, and which she came to see as a prop and a flanker as "violent yet controlled, kind of a form of art".