Maycee Barber: That was a bitter pill

Maycee Barber entered Dana White’s Contender Series with a perfect 4-0 record in the LFA, all but one inside the distance, and again won inside the distance, and got a contract. In an eleven-month span, Barber won three more, with none making it to the third round. The UFC star-making machine revved up, but Roxanne Modafferi shut it down at UFC 246 on January 18, 2020, handing “The Future” a Unanimous Decision loss.

Barber’s fans attributed the loss to a knee injury, and when she recovered from knee surgery, it was, bafflingly, in the co-main spot, at UFC Vegas 19 on Saturday. However, Alexa Grasso won, again via Unanimous Decision.

In her first interview since the second loss, Barber, 22, spoke with Cole Shelton for BJPENN.com about what happened, and what’s next.

My camp went great, said Barber. Training was awesome. Weight cut went great, but I didn’t realize how much I would feel my knee in there and think about it. My timing was also off. My range was off. A lot of different things were not what I expected them to be. But props to Alexa because she had a great gameplan, and she did what she needed to do and she got the win.

I’m definitely happy with how the third round went, and I learned a lot. Obviously, as soon as I lost, I wanted to deal with it. There were no injuries. I’m healthy, so it was a bitter pill to swallow like, ‘Dang, I didn’t perform. I didn’t do what I felt was going to happen.’ I was a little more bitter, so I didn’t think back about the lessons. Now, I am going to sit down and go through the whole camp, the training, and what I can learn from it.

I think there are always going to be people that are, like, when they see someone with a goal or a plan, they either want to see you achieve it, or they want to see you fail miserably. There are going to be both either way. Like I told you before, at least they’re watching. But yeah, there are always going to be people that want to see you fall on your face and laugh at you while you’re down. That’s fine. At the end of the day, I’m still the one getting in there, and not many people can do that.

The destination is still the same, but we just have another detour we need to go around. The path might change a little bit, but the title is still the goal in the long run. How we get there, whether it is beat a bunch more people and make some money, we will find out. … There should be a lot of growth, and you will see a lot more grittiness and a lot more going after it and finishing the girls – a meaner version.

At the post-fight press conference, UFC president Dana White still saw a bright future for “The Future.”

She’s a savage, said White. She’s one of the most ambitious and toughest young women that I’ve ever met, so I expect nothing but big things for her. She’s a baby still. She’s young, she’s got nothing but time.

I know she put this unbelievable pressure on herself to be a champion before Jon Jones and it’s good to set goals for yourself, but she’s a baby. She’s got nothing but time and she’s only gonna get better.

Grasso is an example of the length of time it can take to make it in the UFC. She entered the UFC at 23 with a 9-0 record, and won her debut. However, for the next three years she went 2-3, before moving up to flyweight, where she is not on a two-fight win streak, and has broken into the top 10.

Prior to her recent losses, Barber was 7-0 to start her career with finishes in her first three UFC appearances.

[Grasso] looked incredible tonight, said White. Listen, Maycee Barber is a gangster. [Barber] believes that she’s gonna be the champ, she comes back from her injury and she is ready to go.

Grasso is a girl that we were looking at a long time ago, we thought that she was gonna be the Ronda Rousey of Mexico. She had a couple of speed bumps in her career, but boy she’s on point now. Her punching is crisp and clean, the distance that she kept, she couldn’t look any more perfect tonight going against an absolute savage.

UG, call it here – where are #15 Barber and #10 Grasso a year from now?