In Defence Of Fighting: Rose Namajunas
A Fighter Profile.
Under The Lights In Jacksonville
Under the lights in Jacksonville arena UFC fans rumbled for the first time since March of 2020. It was the co-main event — former champion Rose Namajunas had what many believed was her most difficult fight against the champion Welli Zang. The fighters made there entries; the fans let their allegiances be known (this was Florida after all) and the sounds of American gospel were pitied against Chinese hip hop. Both fighters hugged their coaches and got their smear of vaseline before entering the Octagon. It’s hard to fathom competition at this level — a UFC fight with a reach far beyond the 15,000 letting their presence be known.
Namajunas moves side to side in blue; trance like, gum-shield in, repeating a mantra to herself with persistent force: “I’m the best, I’m the best.” Zang stands opposite riling herself up in red. A symbolic significance has been playing itself out and everyone watching is participating.
Then the lights go down in Jacksonville and the crowd is in shadow watching on; every miniscule movement matters now — every step, faint, throw, kick; there is no telling where this fight will go. Rose is silky on her feet, much more graceful than Zang — she lands a jab and keeps the distance. Then we see the retaliation from Zang; fierce leg kicks to slow her down. Two different approaches; a race between intricate movement and raw power.
It’s just over one minute in, they are central in the octagon and Rose looks like she’s calculating her next movement. Welli doesn’t know what’s coming, she is defensive while seemingly outside of Rose’s range. Rose takes one step back and one forward launching a front left kick. Welli thinks it’s coming low so she moves her chest back to dodge, but it keeps rising upward and she has lost her tight guard protection. The kick, with definitive precision, passes her hands and lands direct on the jaw-line. Welli Zang drops to the floor like a loose tyre finally excised of all momentum.
Who is Rose Namajunas?
It was in Will Harris’s superb series Anatomy Of A Fighter that I first came across Rose Namajunas. The video was documenting the build-up to Kamaru Usman’s first match-up with Jorge Masvidal. Usman is sitting on the ground in his hotel room, it is July of 2020 and the UFC has made a decisive move to continue behind closed doors. The fight is on Yas Island in Abu Dhabi and the athletes must follow strict Covid-19 procedures — meaning they are effectively locked into their hotel rooms. The camera continues to hold on Usman as sparing strikes can be heard, he is quiet, looking on intently at his teammate and then the camera follows his eyeline to the corner of a high-ceilinged room. A white t-shirted, short haired, meditative Rose Namajunas is the figure behind the punches. She is completely ‘in the zone’; a voice plays over the short clips of fighters getting prepared saying: “See pressure, what it does is, it contorts time, it stretches time out, it makes it seem longer than what it is.” The video jumps forward and the door of that same room is opened. Namajunas walks in, exhales and embraces her coaches: ‘best in the world’ she says — her left eye is dark and swollen and she is smattered with a bloody nose. She had just beaten Jessica Andrade in a vital rematch to put her once again in contention for the strawweight title. There was some mixture of courage and grace I got a glimpse of within that fleeting camera frame. I had to learn more about who this girl was and in the weeks that followed that’s exactly what I did.
Rose Namajunas made her UFC debut on the 20th season of The Ultimate Fighter — a reality T.V show hybrid which was introduced after the Fertitta brothers purchase. The show became a wild card in the UFC’s back pocket — conceptualised as a fighting competition; competitors live together, train and compete against one another for a title shot and contract in the UFC.
Before coming on the show Namajunas had displayed impressive performances at the Invicta championship. One of which saw her transition from a standing clench to a flying arm-bar submission against Katrina Catron. It was clear there was dazzling talent in the young Namajunas, but it needed the furnace of hard challenge to really mould her into a rounded fighter. The Ultimate Fighter was this opportunity and it also informed many fledgling fans on her backstory.
Rose Namajunas grew up in the urban sprawl of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A first generation American to Lithuanian parents, life was tough; mental illness, drug abuse and shootings were recurrent in the inner-city. Her father who had suffered from schizophrenia, died when she was 16. In the latter part of the show Rose reveals that she was sexually abused in her youth and the trauma of it had an echo.
The portrait that was painted was of a fiercely competitive young woman and yet in equal respects kind and dignified. Her biggest combatant is herself. She exudes a turbulence of emotion; breaking into tears in the lead up to fights and physically unable to restrain from the exaltation of victory. This forceful blend of passion and keen emotional sensitivity was backed by a streak of impressive victories that secured her a spot in the final against Carla Esparza. Namajunas, in the end, lost the fight via submission, but it seemed even in defeat she had gained much more. This included a recognition that she could overcome her own insecurities. Her efforts saw her take home the coveted performance of the season and fight of the season.
From there the fighter in Namajunas grew and grew. No small contribution can be levied at her accolade studded support team, including: the legendary boxing coach Trevor Whitman, MMA veteran Greg Nelson, BJJ instructor Tony Basile and Rose’s fiancé Pat Barry (who had a trailblazing journey from K1 kickboxing to the UFC heavyweight division). Nelson believes a lot of Rose’s growth in the sport has come from her ability to simply listen and absorb information at a faster rate than everyone else:
When I go to Rose: ‘we need to do this, this, this’, she just nods her head and says: ‘okay’. If I was to leave the gym and come back tomorrow she’d still be doing those things.
Her increasingly rounded skill, movement and precision was evident in victories over Angela Hill, Paige VanZant and Tecia Torres. Soon it was time for her title shot and its formidable gate-holder, Joanna Jędrzejczyk.
The lead up to the first Joanna and Rose fight was highly emotionally charged. Jędrzejczyk (coming off of five consecutive title defences) attempted to push in on Rose’s previous displays of emotion — continually berating her as ‘mentally unstable’ and seeking to rile an unwitting response. Namajunas, clear in her approach, responded to none of Joanna’s taunts and maintained a level of steely silence throughout the entire pre-fight build up. At the fight week weigh-ins Joanna became a caricature of herself — going so far as to put a closed fist to rose’s lips and later declare: ‘the boogey woman is coming for you.’ It was comical to see the five time champ push so far and so desperately for a reaction. Rose just stood watching on, miming something with her lips, when asked what she was saying, Rose responded:
I’m just saying the lord’s prayer.
The fight was a fierce and stunning first round knockout for Rose. She had become the champion and for her first defence she even took on Joanna again in a rematch. The second fight had none of the jaunting trash talk of the first but all of the fighting expertise — lasting the entire 5 rounds. Even fighting Joanna in her very best form Namajunas still proved superior and retained the title (post-fight the two showcased a high level of mutual respect). An incredible talent had risen to pre-eminence within the UFC and she handled it with all the grace of the greatest of champions. Straight after the first win, as the glittering gold was hung over her shoulder, she replied to the question of how it feels to have won it: “I just want to use my gift for martial arts to try and make this world a better place… to try and change the world… this belt don’t mean nothing man, just be a good person, that’s it…”
For someone to utter these words with the sentiment they evoke within a steel MMA cage is nothing short of miraculous. Call it whatever you want; naïveté, idealism, courage, passion, it doesn’t touch the vigour from the context in which they were uttered.
I remember someone saying that the sport of fighting is one packed with cliches: the adversary and hero, the overcoming of odds, the unexpected champion, the comeback, the legacy fight, the preoccupation with holding ones ground and not giving up. I couldn’t help but think that the designation of the term cliché was used disparagingly. It seems to me that a delineation must be made between something that is overused because of a lack of thought, and something that occurs continually because of a depth of thought. We will always cheer the smaller, thinner man, who rises from the ground after the sucker punch blow, we will always see the story as integral and constitutive of the moment: “the loser now will later be king.”
And so Rose Namajunas echoes in her statements something conditional and remarkable at the same time: to make the world a better place, to be a good person. No matchstick man can tell us these things and make us listen, but someone who was been through a kind of war (with themselves and their opponent), someone who is locked in cage against the highest of athletic talent, someone like that can. And so we listen, but not just to the words, never just to the words, but to the palpable feeling we cannot deny.
Aside from her fighting career Rose is trained as a classical pianist, something she says aids her training in relation to pattern recognition. She is also a keen and passionate farmer and is involved with earthship global (who focus on self-sufficient housing through recycled materials and energy conservation). In short, she is not an easily characterisable individual. Her YouTube channel includes a series of her travels with Pat to Indonesia and more recently it has become a medium where she records a live by-weekly prayer (something she has been doing since the build-up to the Welli Zang fight). It’s sometimes almost hard to fathom how a fighter like Rose could come about in a sport which originally considered placing alligators under the ring to keep combatants inside.
What We Fight For?
A champion always becomes a representative of their sport. So it was for Pele and Maradona, so it was for Muhammad Ali and Mike Tyson, so it was for Usain Bolt and Michael Jordan, and the names go on. They tell us something about value; what rises and what must fall. They are the posters in our rooms, the ideals of endeavour, the names that elicit something like veneration. Sport is of course one of those rare domains that can simultaneously entrench and transcend the barriers between us. Entrench because we have our teams, our chosen competitors and this means opposition to the other side. But transcend because sometimes an individual can arise above this dichotomy; it is truly rare, but you know it when you see it. The UFC has had many great champions (from George St. Pierre to Ronda Rousey); paragons of the sport they perform and now Rose Namajunas sits right up with them. She has opened doors in the sport in equal measure through her vulnerability and her resilience. In a organisation that is still growing at a faster rate than anyone could have expected, she is as it stands, a crucial tenet.
Fighting has a grip on the imagination of all of us, it demands our attention and stops us dead in our tracks — its corollary in aggression has always been intrinsic in the human make-up for better and worse. MMA, as other sports, puts a perimeter around our human proclivities that could otherwise be detrimental. And still even harboured through a sport it is not a clean slate and sometimes problematic individuals rise to the fore. The hope is that someone better will always come along and that this someone will represent the best of us. The UFC has enabled these individuals to make it through, maybe because only the most authentic can survive in its ranks. A question arises: What do we fight for? And we answer in large proclamations and small intimate ways. For now, in the strawweight division, Namajunas answers this question better than any other.
Maybe her answer is what really sets her apart, giving her the credence of one of those rare individuals that transcend a sport.
