Note: All quotes and material were obtained firsthand by Bleacher Report through a one-on-one between Jessamyn Duke and Bleacher Report’s Riley Kontek.
This week’s episode reminded me of some of my favorite times on the show as well as some of my least favorite. The opening scene showed a few of us doing a shot of liquor to ease the pain of the semifinalists leaving for their tour of the Harley Davidson boot camp. After having a couple of weeks for the sting of our losses to fade, it was a harsh reminder once again that we had failed.
We all felt pretty miserable that day. Luckily though, we had each other to lean on during those times, and we all made an effort to lift each other back up. Just making it as far as we did is an accomplishment in itself and set us apart from all the other fighters who tried out and didn’t make it. It would be crazy to waste an opportunity like we had by just wallowing in our misery. So, we made the best of it!
I’m not gonna lie, after I fought and the pressure was off on the competition, I did really enjoy the rest of my time on the show. I got to eat all the delicious food I wanted. My training opened up immensely. I wasn’t worried about preparing for a fight so I could work on learning lots of new things and really taking advantage of all the things that our coaches had to offer.
I also could really focus on being a good teammate by helping the others cut weight, prepare food and be the kind of training partner they needed without worrying about being selfish. I enjoy being apart of a team like that, and if I’d had the pressure of the competition on my shoulders, I would have missed out on a lot of that.
Those of us on Team Rousey heard that there was some favoritism happening over on Team Tate and it didn’t really surprise us. But quite honestly, I didn’t really care. It wasn’t my problem, it didn’t affect me, and I was just happy that I didn’t have to deal with anything like that over on our team. Even after our losses, all of us still got attention and felt just as much apart of the team as we did before we fought.
Team Rousey really built a family type environment and we all operated as a unit. Each person was important and valuable to the team and our coaches made it clear that they wanted to help us grow as fighters as much as possible in the time they had with us regardless if we were still in the tournament or not. This is why I’ll always be loyal to Ronda and her staff of coaches. They proved that they genuinely cared about us—not about just winning the competition. Their goal was to send all eight of us away as improved fighters.
And speaking of fighters, the stars of this episode were [Michael] Wootten and [Chris] Holdsworth. Going into this fight, I was super confident that Mike had what it took to win, and I still am! However, Holdsworth really showed up that day to fight. He literally made almost no mistakes in that fight, and I thought it was really impressive.
It was a systematic, sick submission win for sure. But I still absolutely believe in Mike as a fighter. Of the male fighters on the show he was definitely my favorite. Check out his HL reel and see how many teeps to the face this guy lands! He just faced a good opponent that day and losing a fight doesn’t mean you’re not a good fighter.
Next up were Julianna [Pena] and Sarah [Moras]. These two have fought before, and Sarah won via armbar. But at this point in the competition there had been so many surprises that I just wasn’t sure how things would go down. I didn’t know what to think about the matchup honestly. The TUF house experience has a lot of X-factors that none of us had really accounted for. Don’t miss next week’s episode!
**Tune in next week to hear Jessamyn’s thoughts on the continued tension between coaching staffs, more in-depth stories from the house and her thoughts on the fight between Sarah Moras and Julianna Pena.
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