Casey O’Neill may be Australia’s latest MMA prospect, but she will carry a little bit of Scottish and Thai pride, too, when she makes her UFC debut in a featherweight bout against Shana Dobson in Las Vegas this weekend (5 p.m. Saturday on ESPN+).
O’Neill’s journey is typical of those who graduate to the world’s premier mixed martial arts promotion in that she has had to grind away through smaller promotions, has honed her skills across the globe and dealt with setbacks to get her chance at the big time.
But it is just as much a uniquely personal journey, with her love for the sport born out of a deep bond with her father. A bond that took her to the verge of a UFC debut in 2020 before COVID-19 derailed what was to be her first crack inside the Octagon.
That was tough to take, certainly, but O’Neill was able to process the disappointment quickly, in part due to an adaptability she has forged since her childhood.
“My parents moved us over to the Gold Coast, I think I was about 10 years old when we got there originally,” O’Neill told ESPN. “I was super happy to be there, with the theme parks and the sun and the beach, and just everything that I’d never experienced growing up in a place like Scotland.
“It was a pretty easy adjustment when we first got here, the school year was going on and, in Scotland, you start a year before you do in Australia, so my sister and I had about seven months when we didn’t have to go to school. We just hung out all day at the pool, the beach, the theme parks. I was just loving life. Every time I got on the phone to my family back home I was telling them about this dream life that I was living.
“And then we started school, which I didn’t love. I had an accent, I was the new girl and I was shy… but it didn’t take me too long to warm up to people and figure out how to do a fake Australian accent to fit in, and we were away from there.”
O’Neill says it was her parents’ desire for a better life that brought the family to the east coast of Australia, where the sun, surf and entertainment options are a little more abundant than what they had left behind in Kilmarnock.
Sure, there might be some chilly surf not too far away on the east coast of Scotland. The sun, however? Probably not so much.
“My parents hated living that life that everybody in the U.K. lives, where they just wait for that two-week break and you go on holidays and then you go back home and you do the same thing year after year,” she said. “So they wanted something different for me and my sister, which is why they moved us to Australia.”
The building blocks of O’Neill’s career had however been laid in Scotland.
“I’ve always been a daddy’s girl. I started kickboxing because my dad would pick me up from school and I would do it while he was doing it,” O’Neill recalled. “I would sit on the sidelines and I would beg to jump in or I’d shadowbox and stand there and pretend I was involved, just anything to hang out with my dad.
“That’s how it started with the kickboxing, and then once we moved to Australia I just always wanted to hang out with my dad. I just thought my dad was the coolest person in the world. Whatever he was doing, I was doing; when he started doing jiu-jitsu in Australia, I started doing jiu-jitsu.”
Cam O’Neill runs the Eternal MMA promotion in Australia, which Casey worked her way through, successfully winning her first five professional fights.
But before the 23-year-old was allowed to step in and pull on the gloves she was earning her keep in whatever way she could lend a hand, all the while dreaming of what might lie ahead.
“Once we got to Australia my dad actually started a different promotion, it wasn’t Eternal, it was called Days of Glory — it was one of the first ever pioneer MMA shows in Australia,” O’Neill said. “I was about 13 when he started that, [I was] working on the door, taking tickets and just trying to help out in any way that I could.
“And from that first fight show that he had, I was telling him that I was going to be fighting for him one day. He was just telling me that there was no way his daughter was going to be doing that.
“It was still sort of frowned upon for females to fight back then. I know it wasn’t that long ago but as females we haven’t been in the [MMA] spotlight for that long. In Australia there were really no females fighting at that time, so Dad was like ‘there’s no way you’re going to be one of the first’. And then about two years later I ended up being one of the first, once he started Eternal MMA. I kept hassling him and eventually a couple of weeks before my 16th birthday he let me fight on one of his shows.”
With the benefit of hindsight, O’Neill freely admits that she wasn’t ready for that fight in 2014 and the one that followed 18 months later. Both bouts finished in Round 1 TKO defeats, putting a momentary halt on what had otherwise been an unwavering sense of self-belief.
It proved to be a time of significant personal growth, both physically and mentally.
“To be honest I had that [confident] mindset about four months before the fight that I won [against Gina Cardillo in August of 2017],” she said. “After those first two losses I took two years off, just training every day, and then we got to the point where I was thinking ‘we’re so good, I’m way better than any of these girls in Australia’; I was thinking that before I’d even won a fight.
“Once I started thinking that [again] my dad booked me that fight and I won. And that solidified my mindset even more and continued to build momentum from that day.”
O’Neill has since rattled off 10 straight wins, five each in the amateur and then the professional ranks – the latest being a KO victory at the UAE Warriors event in September 2020.
And so the UFC came knocking.
“Yeah, I was taking that fight [against Lauren Murphy] on short notice, because my teammate Cynthia Calvillo got COVID,” she said. “So I went and did all the testing and signed the contract, and I was ready to leave for Fight Island, and then [manager Danny Rubenstein] called me and said ‘hold on, you have COVID, too’.
“I had no idea, it was really devastating. I was rundown and I was tired, it definitely took me a long while to get my cardio [fitness] back to what it was; there was probably a month there where I was feeling the effects of it on my cardio. That was pretty scary, that three weeks after testing negative you were still struggling to breathe during sessions and do what you were doing in the past. But it’s all passed now luckily and I’m back to 100 percent.”
O’Neill now looks back on the COVID episode as a blessing in disguise, as it afforded her the opportunity for a full fight camp in the lead-up to this weekend’s showdown with Dobson.
She says she has the “all round” MMA skill set that will be too much for the American, a technique that has been built under the early tutelage of her father, at the renowned Tiger Muai Thai gym and then finally at Xtreme Couture and the UFC Performance Institute in Las Vegas.
“Moving to Tiger helped me grow so much as a fighter, not only because of the level of talent on the mat and the level of coaching, but even just the uncomfortable situation of being away from home and just having to make the adjustments and make it all work,” she said.
“So I would say that I improved leaps and bounds since I moved to Tiger; I’ve had two fights under the Tiger Muai Thai banner and both fights were my best fights to date, each one topping each other.
“I’m super confident in my abilities as a fighter, I work on everything 24/7, I don’t really take time off. So I would say that I am a pretty well-rounded fighter and I do have a lot of ways of finishing fights, which I’ve proven in the past, and I can also go the distance.
“So that gives me a lot of confidence going into this fight knowing that no matter where the fight goes, or how long the fight goes for, that I’m going to be there ready for it. I envision myself getting the finish in this fight, recently I’ve just started to get better at finishing and I believe that this fight will end up that way for me.”
From Scotland to Australia, Thailand and now Las Vegas, there will be no shortage of support cheering O’Neill when the opening bell sounds this weekend.
But there’s a special place reserved for the man who has been there from the beginning.
“I was always doing what he was doing and he’s definitely the reason why I started fighting; he’s been the reason why I haven’t given up on fighting or given up on myself,” O’Neill said of her dad.
“He’s been a big mentor to me, in terms of my life and MMA as a sport.”