By all accounts, John Douma is a mother’s dream. At 19 years old, he has an associate’s degree, a full-time job, goes to the gym daily and leads a healthy, disciplined lifestyle. But he also is a mixed martial artist, training to be a cage fighter with the goal of someday being a star in the UFC.
Through four amateur bouts, Douma — a native of Wyckoff, N.J., who now lives near Warwick, R.I. — is 2-2. In his second bout, he suffered an orbital fracture and needed emergency surgery, and in his most recent fight last April, he was knocked out.
“I couldn’t really tell you what happened in that fight,” he told The Post. “I don’t remember.”
His mother, Ronni, and father, Pete, have been to all four fights. It is a mother’s nightmare to see her son choose such a dangerous endeavor.
“My feeling as a mother is it’s excruciating to think about what he’s about to do and then have to sit and watch it,” Ronni said. “Once I find out he has a fight I have this pain in my stomach and it increases until the day of the fight. It’s difficult to see your kid out there hitting someone and getting hit. I’m stressed out.”
She’s also very proud.
“I respect what he does,” said the mother, who also has a 22-year-old son named Peter. “It’s not an easy thing. He’s 19 years old, and I’m amazed at the focus he has and the sacrifices he makes. A lot of people his age are at parties. But he’s keeping himself extremely healthy and very fit.”
John Douma is typical of young men and women around the country becoming enthusiasts of MMA, a combat sport that mixes fighting disciplines like karate, judo, jiu-jitsu and striking. He played football and wrestled for four years at Ramapo High School, where he graduated in 2014. When he moved to Rhode Island to attend the New England Institute of Technology, he was looking for a way to stay in shape and soon walked into Tri Force MMA in Pawtucket.
“I was just bored,” he said. “I wanted to get good workouts, and I didn’t want all that time when I did wrestle to go to waste. I always wanted to try MMA and there was a gym by me, so I went in and tried it. From there, I just kind of started to get good at it and enjoyed it.”
His next amateur fight is scheduled for June 18 in Plymouth, Mass., and soon after he hopes to turn professional with the goal of someday being part of the UFC or Bellator, the dominant promotional brands in MMA.
“I’m definitely going to go pro,” said the 5-foot-7, 145-pound featherweight. “I was thinking like maybe two more fights. But it’s really when I feel comfortable in the cage. I’m only 19 years old. I’ve got all the time in the world and once you go pro, that’s your pro record. You have to make sure you’re ready for it.”
Douma has applied to the University of Rhode Island, where he would study business, but the possibility he someday could be fighting for a living is something Ronni has accepted as inevitable. But that acceptance hasn’t come easily. She watched her son break an ankle playing high school football — he needed the insertion of a metal plate and screws to repair the fracture. There were other injuries during four years of football and wrestling beyond bumps and bruises. So when her son first expressed an interest in MMA, she hoped it was just talk.
“I thought it was just a phase he was going through,” she said. “But he went up to Rhode Island in mid-September and called about a week later and said he’d found an MMA gym that he joined and said, ‘I’m going to fight.’ I kept thinking that he would need a lot of time to train and get ready for a fight. But within a year he had his first fight. I didn’t have much to say about it. He knows how I feel. He also knows that we support him.”
Long before the pay-per-view events, most fighters start as amateurs, then turn pro and hope to fight for a promotional company like Classic Entertainment Sports, which promotes MMA and boxing cards in Rhode Island, Massachusetts and Connecticut. CES calls itself “the gateway to the UFC,” having had several of its former fighters, such as Charles Rosa and Rob Font, sign with UFC. It also offers worldwide exposure through a broadcast partnership with AXS TV.
“Everyone that steps in the cage has UFC in the back of their head,” Douma said. “That’s why you do it.”
Jimmy Burchfield Jr., vice president of CES promotions, doesn’t have to search for MMA fighters.
“After our events are aired on AXS TV, we probably get somewhere between a dozen or two dozen inquiries from fighters around the world,” he said. “The sport is really blowing up.”
Whether turning pro is in Douma’s best interests could be determined by how he gets through his upcoming fight in June. Having his orbital bone broken in the first round of his second fight is one thing. Getting knocked out in only his fourth fight is another.
“It’s definitely a concern,” Douma said. “You see these guys that are slurring their speech and stuttering and all that. I really don’t want to be like that. I figure three knockouts for me and I’ll call it quits if it ever comes to that.”
To prepare herself, Ronni is learning more about MMA.
“When John was in high school and wrestled, I’d follow all of the stats on all the guys and all the schools and where they were ranked,” she said. “Now I’m doing it with MMA. It makes me feel like it’s a sport and not something so dangerous when I know all the players and who’s doing it. I guess it keeps me sane.”