Rose Namajunas might today be enjoying her second title reign in the UFC strawweight division, but she’s grateful that she didn’t take gold the first time round. Rose came up on The Ultimate Fighter, eventually succumbing to a finish at the hands of Carla Esparza in the final, missing out on the title because of it.
She’s 29 now, but had Rose won, at the age of 22 she would have been the youngest ever UFC champion. She told The MMA Hour that she would have mimicked the bad behavior of another notoriously young champ: the legally beleaguered Jon Jones.
Thug Rose Would Have “Crashed a Few Cars” if She Won Title As Young as Jon Jones
“Had I won that fight, who knows where I would be. I was going to be youngest champion, like, younger than Jon Jones. Not definitely, but I can only imagine that with winning a fight like that at that point in my life, I probably would have crashed a few cars, or been doing all kinds of bad things. My life probably would have been way more out of control.
Joanna [Jedrzejczyk] probably would have whipped my ass.” Rose actually thanked Esparza for the loss, crediting it with a serious development in her fight game and lifestyle.
“I wouldn’t go back and change anything for nothing. That fight was the best thing that probably happened to me in my whole career. All of my losses have done wonders for me. But that one in particular, there was a lot of information that I downloaded. Without getting into too much detail, I’ve been a partier since I was really young. I don’t do that no more.
It just got really dangerous. I had a few different wake-up calls. You get out of a situation and you go, ‘Wow, I could have died, or somebody else could have died,’ or really bad stuff. Not everybody’s fortunate enough to have that moment of clarity to be like, ‘OK, I need to stop messing around here, because not only is my life in danger, but other people’s as well.’
Since I was 13 years old, I was drinking and doing all kinds of stuff, and I stopped, I want to say the last time I had a hard drink was my last amateur fight, and then I got super wasted and I woke up the next morning and there kind of, I was like, I was fighting. I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, I could have really gotten hurt. I’ve gotta stop doing this.’”
What do you make of Rose’s attitude? Let us know in the comments.
