New Opponent, Same Approach for Jaqs Hughes

When an injured Tiger Lily Charles was pulled from Saturday's Battle of Champions V card last Friday, the event lost not only its coolest name, but also one half of its scheduled PKF featherweight title fight, a rematch between Charles and the highly touted, undefeated Jaqs Hughes.

“I would love to have the opportunity to rematch her. I’m definitely upset about that,” the 31-year-old Hughes confessed to Long Island Fights, “but I’m excited that someone stepped up and took the fight on such short notice. That says a lot about a fighter.”

And that someone is Elyse Tomasello, a local fighter about whom Hughes knows “absolutely nothing.”

“I’m not going to change too many things,” Hughes said of her final week of training. “I just want to keep it as calm and as cool as I can.”

But don’t let the “calm and cool” talk fool you: Hughes is all business in the gym;  she believes, for exanmple, that even in the gym “every sparring round is for a belt.”

But what drew Jaqs into kickboxing was a far cry frm championship gold. About six years ago, Hughes was invited to teach cardio-kickboxing class at her cousin’s dojo. She wanted to “teach it the right way,” so she took a couple of women’s classes with Berman and fell in love with full-contact kickboxing right away. Four years later, and the Berman-Hughes team is poised to capture the NY State PKF Featherweight Championship.

 “Obviously I want the knockout,” Hughes said when asked about Saturday night. “I think everyone does –- they’re lying if they say they didn’t –- but I want it to be a clean fight. I’d like it to be like a Fight of the Night. I would like both of us to look really good, to look like fighters, to come out and represent ourselves as fighters, as women.”