Sage Northcutt's Sister Makes Her Pro Debut Next Month

Last weekend, Legacy Fighting Alliance announced that 24-year-old Colbey Northcutt makes her pro debut at LFA 14 on June 23 in Houston, Texas, where she faces another debuting fighter in Courtney King. The fight will be broadcast on AXS TV, and while airing debuting fighters on cable isn't unique, it will always seem weird to me. There's a low pleasure threshold for an audience watching a fighter with, say, fewer than five pro fights, and it's kind of a crappy thing to do for an athlete competing for entry-level wages and getting used to a new, violent reality. Warming up for your first opponent who you know can legally elbow a crater in your face is probably anxiety-inducing enough without thinking of the faceless thousands who will watch you from their couch.

But this fight would find a mass audience even if it took place in an Elks Lodge in Arkansas and someone uploaded a shaky iPhone video, because Colbey is the sister of 21-year-old UFC lightweight-and-quasi-welterweight "Super" Sage Northcutt. It'd be a hard fact to hide on appearances alone: Colbey and Sage look like anime characters emerging from the same gene pool, drawn with the same pencil. Like Sage, Colbey was reared on karate and kickboxing, and she was named 2009 Competitor of the Year by Black Belt magazine. She went 4-1 as an amateur between 2012 and 2014, winning the Legacy FC women's amateur bantamweight title along the way. And she's six feet tall—at least four inches taller than every UFC women's bantamweight champion to date.

The elder Northcutt sibling returns to the cage almost three years after her last amateur bout, during which time her younger brother became one of the most polarizing and mesmerizing characters in the sport. Blonde and vascular, polite and earnest, overpaid (relatively speaking) and overhyped (relatively speaking), twice booked on Big Fox cards, twice tapped in the second round, and yet the UFC has relentlessly promoted Sage Northcutt as a star, an elite fighter without the years-long win streak or any win streak at all since 2015. The marketing of Sage Northcutt has been an exercise in self-evident celebrity, in myth making without ever really conveying the myth.

The thing is it totally worked. I am interested in watching the career of Sage Northcutt unfold because it's had such an absurd start, with stakes that are never really identified aloud but that everyone knows exist. Whether he lives up to a billing he didn't necessarily want or flames out is all part of the allure. So is finding out whether you can do the impossible and create a fighting celebrity without the usual raw materials. It's kind of like how people have their deceased dogs cloned in a South Korean lab: you can spend a lot of money to artificially engineer something you think you know so well, but you can only tell how it measures up to your familiar, dead Golden retriever by watching how it behaves afterward.

It'd be a fitting adjunct to the strange fame of Sage Northcutt if the spotlight suddenly fell on Colbey too, because as long as we're trying to construct one star out of thin air and open-fingered gloves, why not another from the same family? With a win on June 23, imagining a UFC event anchored around a brother and sister fighting on the same card is as easy as closing your eyes. (Add in a vaguely dystopian future: imagine a card made up of one entire family fighting another.) The only questions are whether the impossible expectations and unsought attention heaped on one Northcutt would turn into vines crawling up the family tree, and if the sins of the younger brother shall be visited upon the older sister. I, for one, can't wait to find out.