On February 16, 2007, an unknown fighter made her professional debut in front of 2,427 people in Japan and shocked the audience and promoter when she defeated her opponent, the promotion’s champion. After the fight, she removed the tape from her hands, wrote the date and her opponent’s name on them, and returned to South Korea. 13 years later and the fighter who used to collect her plane tickets to an from fights in Japan now collects championship belts.
At the age of 33, Ham Seo Hee is considered to be the best Atom-weight in the world. She has been fighting since she was 19 and has witnessed first hand the ups and downs of the sport. This article will attempt to detail her storied career, which appears to be far from over.
A Born Fighter
Born in 1987, Ham wasn’t originally interested in martial arts. As a child she was interested in the piano and performing. Her talent was evident as she secretly went to an audition with a talent agency when she was in 5th Grade and passed. As a result, she appeared in several TV dramas and was also in a play. This didn’t last though, as Ham was having problems at school. Not one to start fights, Ham would step up to defend her friends and as a result, got in a lot of fights. This led to the police getting involved and she was forced to switch schools. Things did not get better as rumors of the fights spread in the new school and she got into more fights, forcing her to switch schools again.
Time went on and when she was in her second year of high school, Ham became interested in joining the military. In order to prepare for this, her parents recommended that she go to a Taekwondo gym. It was at the gym that she was introduced to kickboxing, which she was drawn to as she liked the variety of strikes involved. After several months of training her coach entered her into a tournament where she finished runner-up. Despite breaking her nose and getting covered in bruises and welts, a fire awoke inside of her. Ham would later say in interviews that the tournament opened her eyes to a new world and that the thrill she felt fighting didn’t compare to anything else.
During this time, there were not a lot of MMA opportunities in South Korea in general, let alone women’s matches which didn’t exist at the time. As a result, fighters who wanted to compete went to Japan and competed for organizations like Deep. One of those fighters was future UFC veteran Dong Hyun Kim, who after several matches was asked by Deep officials if he knew any women that could compete. He of course thought of his fellow gym member, Ham. This opportunity came at a good time for Ham as she had been kickboxing for roughly 3 years and essentially run out of opponents in Korea. Without any kickboxing opponents and with no MMA opportunities in Korea, it only made sense that she would follow in the footsteps of her fellow gym members and go to Japan.
MMA Debut
Kim took Ham with him to Deep in February of 2007, where they both had matches scheduled. The 0-0 Ham, was set to face 17-4 Deep Champion Hisae Watanabe who was coming off of a devastating KO victory over Satoko Shinashi and had won an impressive 11 matches by KO. Where most people might be nervous to make their debut against such an accomplished champion, Ham was excited.
From a matchmaking perspective, Deep was attempting to navigate several stars and create what at the time would have been a big fight between Watanabe and Miku Matsumoto. Watanabe, who was a power puncher with a sub-par grappling game, was essentially nearing the end of her career (her last match was that year in 2007 before returning 9 years later) and Deep wanted to match her against rising star Miku. In order to build up the fight, Watanabe was placed in what seemed to be a favorable non-title match against a kickboxer who was making her pro-debut. However, to everyones’ surprise, Ham overwhelmed and dominated her for the entire fight, winning by Unanimous Decision and making a strong impression on both the audience and Deep officials. Deep head Saeki discussed his surprise after the fight and discussed bringing Ham back and the possibility of a title match in the future.
Courtesy of Gravity
Running the Gauntlet
After such an impressive debut, the inexperienced Ham had to fight her way through a gauntlet of experienced Japanese fighters, which included losses to the before mentioned Miku Matsumoto, Yuka Tsuji, and Megumi Fujii. To put this in perspective, in roughly her first year of competition, Ham faced Matsumoto who was 13-4 at the time, Tsuji who was 20-1, and Fujii who was 14-0. These losses were only one of several hardships facing Ham at this point in her career. In addition to the losses adding up, she was suffering injuries, feeling pressure to do something else, and opportunities to compete were becoming scarce.
In the match with Tsuji she injured her arm and then she re-injured it in the match with Fujii. Ham, whose parents were not 100% behind her decision to fight, felt the need to remove the cast before she got home so that her parents wouldn’t know about the injury. To make matters worse, opportunities to fight were drying up, as Smackgirl, the main promotion for women in Japan, went out of business and opportunities to fight in Korea still didn’t really exist.
In response to these hardships, Ham got a job at a nail salon and attempted to start a new life. After working there for roughly a year and a half, she went to a K-1 show with a friend. While watching the fights, Ham was reminded of the thrill she felt fighting and her passion was reignited. In addition, a new women’s promotion had started putting on events in Japan, Jewels.
Return to the Ring
In 2009, Ham not only returned to the ring, but she also began to take her career more seriously. She would later credit two changes with her current success, the first of which was her attitude towards training. She started training six days a week, which was in sharp contrast to her previous regime where she would travel to Busan before her fights to train but not train if a fight wasn’t scheduled. This increased discipline paid off as she went 7-2 after returning, defeating Mika Nagano, Saori Ishioka, and V.V. Mei. In fact, her only losses were Straw-weight title matches against Ayaka Hamasaki, which would lead to Ham’s eventual drop to Atom-weight, the second change she credits with her current success.
Return to Kickboxing
If one examines her MMA record, they may notice that Ham didn’t have any matches in 2012. The reason for this being that Ham took part in a number of high profile kickboxing and shoot boxing matches during this time period. In August of 2011, she entered the Girl’s S-Cup Shoot Boxing Tournament. The tournament was at the time an annual one-day tournament, made popular by Rena, where the winner would have to win three fights. Ham advanced to the finals defeating Emi Fujino and Mina before losing in a competitive bout with Erika Kamimura. Erika Kamimura was a very popular kickboxer at the time who won several world championships and was angling for a super-fight with Rena. While Erika was able to temporarily drop Ham with punches, the fight was a back and forth slug-fest where Ham badly hurt Erika with a series of throws. In an interview after the tournament, Erika told me that she thinks she might have gotten a concussion from one of the throws where she landed on the back of her head. Ham’s performance made quite the impression as she competed exclusively in kickboxing and Shoot Boxing in 2012. She faced off against Erika again at Rise, where she lost by decision and entered another Shoot Boxing Tournament, where she lost to Rena in the semi-finals.
Drop to Atom-weight
In 2013, Ham returned to MMA at Atom-weight and immediately won the Jewels Atom-weight title. After Deep merged with Jewels, she went on to win the Deep Jewels Atom-weight title as well. While these championships were likely important to Ham another development was going on that she likely felt was equally as important. In her home country, Road FC was founded in 2010 and in 2013 they put on their first women’s match. Ham who had only competed in South Korea once in 2007, signed with the promotion and rattled off two victories.
The UFC
2014 was a busy year for Ham, not only was she able to compete in her native South Korea, she became the first Korean woman to sign with the UFC. As a veteran of the sport, Ham realized that by fighting for the UFC she would have to return to Straw-weight and would be giving up a size advantage to her opponents. After losing her promotional debut to now Feather-weight JoJo Calderwood, Ham got the opportunity to fight in South Korea again.
With a number of Korean fighters on the roster, the UFC made the decision to hold their first event in the region and naturally Ham was slated to fight on the card. In what must have been a surreal feeling, Ham was set to fight in the Olympic Gymnastics Stadium in front of more than 12,000 people with her long-time teammates Dong Hyun Kim and Choi Doo Ho also competing on the card. Going into the fight, Ham had a mixture of feelings. While she was more confident about fighting in a cage and felt her wrestling had improved, she was nursing a knee injury which made her doubt her ability to move, which she knew she would have to do against a bigger opponent.
Ham made the most of the opportunity, winning a unanimous decision against Cortney Casey in a crowd pleasing fight. Not only was the crowd pleased with her performance, Ham won fight of the night honers, which included a $50,000 bonus, which caused her earnings to climb from $22,500 to $72,500 for the night.
Her fight in South Korea would be the highlight of her time in the promotion, as Ham would end up going 1-3 in the promotion before deciding not to resign with the promotion, the size disadvantage had been too much to overcome on a consistent basis. Despite them not having her division, Ham signed with them because as she said, it is the goal of any fighter, regardless of gender to fight in the UFC.
Return to Atom-weight
After leaving the UFC, Ham returned to her native South Korea and signed with Road FC. When asked what her goals were at the time by a journalist, she replied, “I want to fight as much as possible, you are a reporter so you do a lot of interviews, if you are an office worker you do a lot of office work, if you are a fighter you want to fight a lot.”
As one of the faces of the promotion, which was attempting to develop their women’s division, Ham defeated Mina Kurobe in 2017 in the main event via TKO to become the promotions first Atom-weight champion. In her next match, Ham faced off against Invicta FC Atom-weight title challenger Jinh Yu Frey in what at the time was close to being a super fight. Both Ham and Frey could make claims to being the 2nd ranked Atom-weight in the world, as both had lost to Hamasaki, and both were promotional standouts. In some ways the match was Road FC vs Invicta FC.
Ham didn’t need much time, as she knocked Frey to the ground with a vicious overhand left and finished her with ground strikes in the first round. Afterwards, an extremely emotional Ham, apparently unaware that the force of the punch had broken her arm, broke down into tears in her corner.
Rizin
After the dominant performance against Frey, Ham would fight one more time for Road FC. In 2019, Rizin was able to secure access to Ham via Road FC, with whom they have a working relationship and Ham was slated to make her debut against then Deep Jewels Atom-weight Champion Tomo Maesawa.
In a homecoming of sorts, Ham, who hadn’t fought in Japan for roughly five years, wore the same costume that she wore when she made her pro-debut back in 2007. She stated in interviews that this was her debut for the promotion and that she had a general feeling of starting anew and that she wanted to show that with her costume. The match was a one-sided affair, where Ham dominated the Deep Jewels Champion and finished her with brutal knees in the corner before the fight was waved off in the first round. Afterwards Ham called out Miyuu Yamamoto who entered the ring and the two agreed to fight in the future.
A little more than two months after challenging her in the ring, Ham faced off against numerous time world champion wrestler Miyuu Yamamoto at Rizin 19. At the time, Miyuu was on a four fight win streak, including a win over Rizin Super Atom-weight Tournament Champion Kanna Asakura. This time Ham finished Miyuu via TKO in the second round. A tired Miyuu had shot in for a takedown and Ham sprawled and finished her with hammerfists, after she had already opened a cut in similar fashion. Because of her two impressive victories, Ham was able to secure a third fight with then Rizin champion Ayaka Hamasaki, but this time at Atom-weight.
Agent Issues
When Ham first fought in Japan, she hadn’t turned 20 yet and didn’t have the language skills to negotiate or deal with contracts in Japanese. As a young fighter who wasn’t getting paid a lot of money, she followed the lead of fighters she knew like Kim who used a couple in Japan, the Morookas. Mrs. Morooka was of Korean heritage and spoke the language and her husband was a fight promoter and ran a company called Makoto Sangyo which produced 90% of the boxing rings in Japan.
During this time period, a lot of the Korean fighters would not have been making a lot of money as they were just starting out, so the Morooka couple said they would help the fighters find fights for free and take care of everything for them. In many ways, they acted like guardians for the fighters and Ham was extremely grateful, seeing them as her parents in Japan. Mr. Morooka would go on to say that he had never made any money from helping a fighter and that every time he helped someone, he actually lost money. Comments like these and a steady stream of fights, caused Ham to ignore the occasional rumors that they were stealing money from fighters.
It wasn’t until Ham was to fight Hamasaki for the Rizin title that Ham figured out what was going on. By this time, they had been her agent for 30 fights in Japan. However, in this time Ham had never seen a contract. She had also never signed a contract. Via her connections with Road, Ham was able to see a copy of her Rizin contracts and realized that her signature had been forged on all of the documents. In addition, the money didn’t add up. Mr. Morooka had told her that he had wired her all of the money for the two fights. In reality he had kept all of the money for one of the fights, and sent her the money for the other fight, a theft of 50% or roughly $30,000 dollars.
While it is true that Ham was getting paid less in her earlier fights, it can only be imagined the amount of money that was taken from her over 30 fights. As a result of their forgery and theft, Road FC on behalf of Ham filed forgery charges against the couple in Korea and the head of Road FC flew to Japan to talk to Rizin about the issue.
Number One Ranking
In December of the same year, despite her issues with her former agents, Ham faced off for the third time against rival Ayaka Hamasaki and defeated her by split decision in a back and forth fight. In defeating Hamasaki, Ham rose to the consensus number 1 ranked Atom-weight in the world. Afterwards, people were exited for future fights with Hamasaki and Rena within the promotion. However it was not to be. It turns out that the fight with Hamasaki was the last fight on Ham’s contract with Road FC, with whom Rizin had been dealing, and though no formal announcements have been made, Ham relinquished the title and according to the RIZIN CEO she has signed with ONE FC where she will likely participate in the Atom-weight tournament they are putting together.
While her future may be uncertain, it is likely that Ham will be around for awhile as she has said, “I know people who only fought in the ring once, but I am addicted to it.”
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