CHICAGO — Jessamyn Duke has moved her training base from the Glendale Fight Club down Southern California’s clogged freeways to Fullerton, where she’s learning catch wrestling with the likes of Josh Barnett.
But make no mistake about it: Duke is still a Four Horsewoman through and through. Her bonds of friendship with Ronda Rousey, Shayna Baszler, and Marina Shafir are as tight as ever.
And as Duke prepares for her first fight in just over a year Saturday night at UFC on FOX 16, Duke still has strong feelings about the Horsewomen, and for the disrespect shown by Bethe Correia as Correia gets set to meet Rousey at UFC 190.
“It started off as us just kidding around,” Duke told MMAFighting.com of The Four Horsewomen. “But it became something real.”
The undefeated Correia talked her way into a title fight by playing up the fact she defeated both Baszler and Duke, a storyline the UFC ran with.
“When she first started doing it, when she started holding up the four fingers, even then, we kind of laughed and said, ‘cool,'” Duke said. “She was only doing it to hype the fight.”
Then things got real. Corrreia made an ugly comment regarding suicide, a sore subject for Rousey, who lost her father to suicide. It’s clearly an issue which has deeply bothered Duke.
“She doesn’t understand what she got herself into,” Duke said. “I can’t even come up with the right word to describe what Ronda’s going to do to her.”
After a pause, Duke adds, “Ronda Rousey is going to be a very vengeful person in that fight. It’s going to be beyond anything you’ve ever seen from Ronda in a fight. Bethe made a bad, bad choice.”
While the emotion Duke displays in discussing Rousey-Correia is indicative the she appreciates what the Horsewomen era meant for her life and career, Duke is excited to launch her next chapter, which debuts when she meets Elizabeth Phillips on the Fight Pass prelim card Saturday.
Duke dropped her past two fights, and, compounding matters, she suffered a bad broken hand in her last bout, a loss to Leslie Smith last July. In the interim, she realized it was time to try something a little different.
“The timing just seemed right for a change,” Duke said. “I’m grateful for everything I learned, but I mean, when you get to work with someone like Josh, you’re taking about someone who has been in this sport so long that he’s forgotten more about the sport than most people knew in the first place. Every day you’re learning something new.”
Against Phillips, Duke is coming up on her first career rematch. Duke’s last amateur fight occurred at RFA 2 against Phillips, who was a short-notice replacement.
Duke won the bout via second-round choke, and while most fighters who have defeated an opponent have little interest in giving them a second chance, Duke jumped at the opportunity to once again face off with Philipps.
“I’m treating this like I’m facing a completely different fighter,” Duke said. “We were amateurs, that was three years ago. In this sport that might as well be a lifetime ago.
“She took the fight on two weeks notice when I didn’t even know if I’d have an opponent,” Duke continued. “I’m grateful for that. She deserves the opportunity to fight with a full fight camp and give me the best she has. I hope she does, I want her to bring the best out of me. I always had a feeling we’d cross paths again, and we both earned our way onto the biggest stage to make it happen.”
Still, just like Duke used the first Philipps fight as her springboard from the amateurs to the pros, going from Invicta to The Ultimate Fighter 18 to the UFC’s bantamweight race, she plans on using their rematch as the opportunity to show the world the next stage in her progression.
“Everyone forgot about me,” Duke said. “Everyone wrote me off because I lost two fights and then was out of action. I’m going to let everyone know I’m back, and that this is a new, improved version of Jessamyn Duke. You’ll see.”