Rose Namajunas starts her climb back to the top at UFC 187
In an excellent new feature on UFC 187's Rose Namajunas written by Thomas Gerbasi, "Thug Rose" recounted a difficult moment in her last fight. After a tough but competitive Round 1 against Carla Esparza last December in a battle for the UFC strawweight championship, Namajunas returned to her corner and was deflated by what her seconds told her.
They told her she'd lost the round and needed to come out in the second with something major. "It definitely killed my confidence even more," she said.
"So going out for the second round, I had everything going against me in my head. I don't think the intentions were to make me lose my confidence even more, but my coaches were striving for perfection and they might have seen me going out a little bit wild and carelessly. I reacted to it in a totally different way.
"I was already thinking, 'That was everything I had and I still lost that round? Well, what's the point?' And all the excuses were tumbling down upon me, and I cracked. Mentally, I broke. There were definitely some physical things that could have been better, but a lot of it was mental."
Namajunas would go on to lose by submission in the third round. She'd torn through The Ultimate Fighter with all submission wins that didn't count toward her official record and got to compete for a world title, but the loss dropped her to 2-2 and out of the spotlight.
Namajunas, still just 22 years old, now understands that she needed the experience. "It was something that had to happen at that moment," she said.
"I'm really young, and I'm not as experienced as a lot of these other girls that I'm competing with. But, at this point now, I wouldn't say that I'm not as experienced anymore, because I did have a title fight. So, whether or not I won or lost, I have that experience under my belt and I learned a lot from it, so I feel like I have that to my advantage."
As for not having such a bright spotlight on her as she heads into her UFC 187 bout against Nina Ansaroff, Namajunas doesn't seem to mind. In fact, flying under the radar has its advantages, according to the fighter.
"It's definitely different than fighting for the title and coming off the show, and it's a pressure that I'm embracing a lot better," she said.
Namajunas said she actually believes that, had she won, she likely would not have handled being a young world champion too well. "Judging how beneficial that loss was for me at that critical point, I would say that I would have handled being a champion very terribly as opposed to what I'm going to handle it like now when I get back up there and get that belt," she said.
"I feel like I'm going to have so much more knowledge and so much more maturity. So it (not becoming champion) was a blessing in disguise. I'm glad that it's going to happen later versus when it would have and when I thought it would have been better for me. But I'm just happy that I'm in the position that I'm in now."
