Thug Rose: It felt like good prevailed
Rose Namajunas on defeat of Joanna Jedrzejczyk: “It felt like good prevailed for once.”
And new UFC women’s strawweight champion Rose Namajunas appeared recently on Ariel Helwani’s The MMA Hour, and discussed her win Saturday night over Joanna Jedrzejczyk. Mixed martial arts is as real as it gets. Sometimes that’s ethical, sometimes less so. It’s real; that’s life.
Pre-fight, Namajunas described herself as a PSA for mental health awareness. Jedrzejczyk responded by snarling that she was already broken.
We’re all human – we want the saintly underdog to win. But simultaneously, you can’t dismiss how compelling is an utterly confident champion. At the weigh-ins Jedrzejczyk hissed mean nothings, while Namajunas silently recited The Lord’s Prayer.
It was “Our father who art in heaven” vs. “I must break you.”
I felt kind of a sadness at that moment, said Namajunas, as transcribed byMarc Raimondi for MMA Fighting. Like dang, like she’s really trying hard. I almost feel bad for her in a way. I don’t know, it’s weird. Kind of hard to explain.
I had so many good ‘I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I’ retorts, your mama. All kinds. At the same time, when I really think about it, that would have made her not look so bad.
This was a fight of mental warfare. I beat her at her own game. I think each time that I wasn’t giving her nothing, she needs that. She needs somebody to fire back. I just wasn’t gonna do it and I just stuck with it. It definitely took a lot of restraint on my end, it took a lot of control. It took a lot out of me to do it. But I knew that’s what I had to do. I knew that’s the way to beat her is to shut her mental game down.
It felt like good prevailed for once. I feel like we’ve been in kind of a dark time these past few years and there’s always gonna be good and bad. We need the villain sometimes. It makes for an interesting story. I think people can relate. They love the Rocky story, they love the underdog. That’s what happened.
Good things don’t last forever, so enjoy and appreciate and honor this today, right now, because Rose Namajunas is a good thing in a world that is short of them.
