After returning from her first knee injury, O’Neill lost to veteran contender Jennifer Maia and then was submitted by Ariane Da Silva nine months later. Somewhere along the way, she switched gyms, shifting her camp to Fight Ready in Arizona and then had an eight-month stint on the sidelines prior to the fight with Santos. When the second knee injury happened, she felt lost, but returning to Bangtao Muay Thai & MMA in Thailand helped her find herself again.
“I never intended to leave Thailand,” O’Neill said. “It was during COVID, and everybody had a weird part of their life during COVID, and I just happened to be in Las Vegas and get signed to the UFC… I have nothing but respect for everybody at Xtreme who helped me and everybody at Fight Ready who helped me as well, and I did learn and grow a lot from those people too. I just don’t know if they were the correct environments for me. Nothing bad about the gym, just that wasn’t where I was flourishing… As soon as I get back to Thailand, as soon as I get off that flight, a peace just comes over me. It’s just a very happy place for me, and obviously there is a lot to that, but it’s where I started my pro career. I had no money when I lived there previously, and I fought really hard to stay there and get to where I am now, so now that I’m back there, I just feel that same hunger every time I go there.
“When you have something in your life that is as much as fighting is to me, it becomes a part of your identity, and you relate yourself with that,” added O’Neill. “‘I’m Casey; I’m a fighter’ — that’s how I aways thought of myself, so to have that forcibly taken away, not be able to do what I love every day, it does shake your identity… But I think it taught me a lot of things too. It taught me to remove myself from the identity of a fighter, that I’m more than a just a fighter, and brought back a lot of love that I had for it before.”
In a lot of ways, it feels like O’Neill’s journey is coming full-circle a couple weeks shy of turning 29, something that causes O’Neill to raise her eyebrows.
