Middleweight prospect Uriah Hall may be the resident terror on Season 17 of The Ultimate Fighter, but it turns out that he’s no match for the famed grappling of Ronda Rousey.
During Episode 10, the UFC’s women’s bantamweight champion joined Chael Sonnen and “Team Darkside” for a training session, prompted by the success of surprise-standout competitor Kelvin Gastelum.
As briefly shown during a short training montage, even a relatively small athlete like Rousey has no trouble putting middleweights on their backs, a true testament to her Olympic-level judo skills.
And as Hall told the New York Post in a recent interview, even he couldn’t manage to escape Rousey’s patented flips, clinch trips and lightning-quick armbar technique, despite outweighing her by at least a solid 50 pounds:
I said to myself, ‘I can get out of this.’ Then she caught me and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this s*** is real.’
You can’t grab her and if you do grab her, you’re f***ed. Thank God they didn’t show that, because she totally kicked my ass.
Rousey’s submission skill with the armbar is widely praised as one of the most dangerous weapons in MMA, as the champion has finished nine opponents with the move so far—six of them during her professional MMA career, to boot.
Moreover, not a single female fighter has made it out of the first round with Rousey, with former challenger Liz Carmouche lasting the longest at four minutes and 49 seconds.
But Uriah Hall doesn’t have to worry about a submission threat of Rousey’s caliber, as he’ll be facing a currently-announced opponent from his season’s lineup on April 13 during the TUF 17 Finale card.
Out of the entire show’s cast, the strongest grappling threats are arguably Kelvin Gastelum, Josh Samman and Jimmy Quinlan, who have all wrestled their ways to victories during the season so far. Hall is still a favorite to win the tournament, especially due to a fantastic spinning heel-kick knockout win that UFC president Dana White called the “nastiest” in TUF history.
McKinley Noble is an MMA conspiracy theorist. His work has appeared in NVision, PC World, Macworld, GamePro, 1UP, MMA Mania & The LA Times.
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