Evolve MMA’s Angela Lee is a Bad Motherf#$ker

16 Feb, 2016

Around this time last year, we pegged John Danaher protege Eddie Cummings as a bad motherf&^ker and he went on to win $20,000 at The Eddie Bravo Invitational and the ADCC trials and made a great run at his first ADCCs in Sao Paulo, Brazil. This year, we are naming undefeated professional MMA fighter Angela Lee of Evolve MMA in Singapore as a bad **** as she wraps up her training camp for her February 20th bout against Rebecca Heintzman at ONE Championship: Tribe of Warriors in Jakarta, Indonesia. Don’t let her happy smile fool you. This 19-year old BJJ brown belt has been jacking up her foes with four submission victories in her first four professional fights. Only one of her four opponents has made it out of the first round against her.

Is Angela Lee for real or is she another youthful and photogenic fighter being hyped like Paige Van Zant and Sage Northcutt? Time will tell. So far, she is off to a great start. Like Sage Northcutt, Angela has been trained from a young age by her father Ken Lee, who owns his own MMA gym in Hawaii and is a Black Belt in BJJ and 6th Degree Hapdosool Master Black Belt. Not be outdone, her mother, Jewelz, is a 5th degree TDS Black Belt Instructor, a 5th degree Hapdosool Master Black Belt, 2nd degree Taekwondo Black Belt instructor and a 2-time Canadian National Silver Medalist. Lee’s favorite training partner and best friend is her brother Christian Lee, who is 17-years old and also an undefeated professional MMA fighter with two first round victories in ONE Championship. The two siblings have wrestled in high school (she was a state champion), won multiple world Pankration championships, trained and taught out of the family’s gym, and currently train out of Evolve MMA in Singapore under her father, former Team Quest coach and current Evolve MMA head coach Heath Sims, and numerous Muay Thai world champions.

Angela represents the dawn of the next generation of MMA. The first generation of MMA fighters were specialists in BJJ, wrestling, kickboxing, or tough street fighters who strongly relied on their base martial arts. The second wave were specialists with strong bases who learned to evolve and grow in other disciplines outside their base martial arts. This new generation is comprised of fighters who were cross trained from a young age in mixed martial arts with an ability to grapple, wrestle, and strike. Thanks to a combination of family genetics, being conditioned for combat sports from a young age, training in both striking, BJJ, and wrestling, and working with the top camp in Asia, Lee already has a major advantage over her peers. She has already competed in hundreds of combat sports bouts that includes karate, pankration, wrestling, BJJ, and MMA competitions.

She is a rare breed of genetics, conditioning, hard work, and opportunities that will become more common in mixed martial arts over the next decade. At only 19-years old, she is already well ahead of the technical and mental learning curves of many of her peers who get into the sport in their late teens and early twenties after training in one martial art or another sports before turning to MMA. It will be fun and interesting to see how her career evolves and where she will be six years from now when she is only 25 years old. Scary.

Angela Lee’s Twister submission victory