Todd and Tamera Sturgis, team drivers – subject and director, respectively, of the film Under Pressure: Diary of a Cage Fighter’s Wife

Todd and Tamera Sturgis make a unique trucking team. Driving for Nationwide Magazine & Book Distributors out of Irving, Texas, the Sacramento, Calif.-area natives haul such well-recognized titles as People and Sports Illustrated magazines. Todd’s a sometime stand-up comic, and Tamera’s modeled for the “Stacked & Packed” series of calendars as well as in other venues. But as in trucking, it’s Tamera and Todd’s collaborative effort as director and subject, respectively, in the documentary film Under Pressure: Diary of a Cage Fighter’s Wife that truly sets them apart.

In 2003, collegial banter became reality. Todd, a then-budding fan with his best friend, Bill Vincent (to whose memory the film is dedicated), of the mixed-martial-arts combat you can see today on Spike TV’s The Ultimate Fighter, had long bounced around the idea of getting into the octagonal cage that is the sport’s ring. As he and Bill watched Ultimate Fighting Championship and other MMA-league videos, he says, “Bill was always egging me on, like ‘You could take that guy.’”

Sturgis had been a wrestler through high school and in college at Chico State in the Sacramento area, but he’d been a long-haul driver for close to a decade and was 40 pounds overweight. “My wife exercises on the road,” he says of Tamera. “She eats healthy, jogs.

We’ve had different exercise machines on the truck.” Todd, however, typically just drove and slept. Without a clear goal, his ambition in the area of fitness just wasn’t sufficient to keep him in shape.

When he told Tamera of his plans to train for an MMA bout, she took it for just more talk. But he persisted. As Tamera tells it, “So I said, ‘How about this: you get into fighting shape and then we’ll think about going into the fight process.’”