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Three years may have passed, but TUF 26’s Lauren Murphy still has resentments towards her former coach Eddie Alvarez.
UFC flyweight fighter Lauren Murphy had a lot of unpleasant things to say about her TUF 26 experience. Most of her grievances were towards her coach, former 155-pound champion Eddie Alvarez.
Lauren first aired out her gripes in late September of 2017, while the show was airing. Alvarez responded not long after, stating it was Murphy who had the “sh-tty attitude.”
Almost three years have passed and Murphy has begun to build a winning streak of her own. But her ill feelings towards her mentor on the show remains unchanged.
“Maybe I would speak to him just to tell him, ‘F—k you,’” Murphy said of Alvarez on on MMA Fighting’s “A-Side Live Chat” on Monday.
“Eddie was just a really bad coach. And I think, maybe, part of what I did really wrong was I had my expectations set so high,” she explained. “I thought he was gonna be this amazing coach and amazing person, and Eddie’s really just an athlete. He’s not a coach, and he’s not a good coach, for sure.”
According to the 36-year-old Murphy, a lot of Alvarez’s supposed abrasive actions happened when the cameras weren’t rolling. Most of them were against female cast members, including those on his own team.
“There was a lot of things that happened on the Ultimate Fighter that don’t get aired,” she said. “There’s a lot of things that don’t get aired that happened that I thought were really upsetting, that I thought were really disrespectful.
“He was really, really unkind to a lot of the women on that show. Not just me, but a lot of the women. I just happened to be the only one that would speak up or say anything about it. So that is the part that made it on air.”
One of the instances she recalled was when Alvarez paid a visit to their house one night, along with a friend who wasn’t connected with the team in any way.
“He came to the house one night … sixteen women living in a mansion,” Murphy recounted. “And he came to the house with a friend of his that wasn’t even a coach on the show – just a random guy that none of us met.
“He got drunk with his friend in our house, watched fights that we weren’t allowed to watch, and then left and never interacted with any of us. It was super disrespectful and bizarre.
“None of that stuff makes it on air. But those were the kinds of things that were really upsetting to me. I just felt so disrespected.”
Murphy also detailed some of Alvarez’s coaching methods on the show, which she said were “degrading” towards the female fighters.
“He had a list of all the women in the house, and he circled with a red marker,” she recounted. “He put a circle around the girls he thought he could win the show, and he put a big red X through the faces of the women he thought didn’t have a chance, and Ariel (Beck) was one of those women.
“He put a big red X through her face. And he left that list sitting out for all of us to see. So she knew the whole season what he thought about her. Of course she didn’t want to go to practice with a guy like that that thought that of her, that thought she had no chance and wasn’t a good fighter.
“He treated us like we were all a bunch of jokes, like we were just stupid little girls with our stupid little game for our stupid little competition,” Murphy added. “He would be really degrading toward us.”
Alvarez left the UFC in 2018 and signed with Singapore’s ONE Championship in a historic trade that had Ben Askren onboard. He is currently 1-1 with the promotion, and his most recent win happened against former champion Eduard Folayang last August.
Murphy, on the other hand, is on a two-fight win streak. Her most recent victory happened against Andrea Lee at UFC 247 last February. She won via split decision.