TUF 20 was a season of many firsts, but never any ‘nexts’?

The truth is, in the fight game there is no life as good as a delusional one, there is no time like the present, and there is no “Next Ronda Rousey.” Carla Esparza has the UFC’s inaugural strawweight belt, and Rose Namajunas, at just 22 years old, has an infinite horizon. Both are good. Neither is Rousey.

Rousey is the demolition ball that crashed through the walls of the palace. Everybody else from here on out is just running through it. She’s the original, and you can’t duplicate the original. There was never going to be another Elvis, even if Glenn Danzig put his best foot forward. Starcrash was never going to be Star Wars. If you spill paint on a canvas, you are not the next Jackson Pollock. You are just clumsy.

The idea is that we carry on in the spirit of the original thing.

I enjoyed the 20th season of The Ultimate Fighter, and it was fun to hum along to the hype-line that there was a burgeoning Ronda Rousey figure buried within the season’s contents. Can’t blame Dana White for his enthusiasm here, either. When a show stretches out for three months, best to set the expectation bar as high as possible and then deal with any shortcomings at the end. Phillipe Nover was never going to be the next Anderson Silva, but it was fun to contemplate a nurse punting Vitor Belfort’s head into the stands.

Uriah Hall was never going to replace the actual boogeyman.

At some point it was easy to assume that the Rousey-esque figure was Namajunas, the sylph-like hellcat who carries the nickname “Thug” in juxtaposition to all outward appearances. Of the contestants, she had the whole deal…looks, game, mojo, menace. She had a competitiveness that ran unsettlingly deep. As with Rousey, there were tragic back-story elements to sort out, the scaffolding beneath her intensity. As with Rousey, too, she stood at just enough of a remove from our comfort levels for human decency to make her different. There was something feral in play. She declared up front she liked to hurt people.

That, too, was endearing.

As the secret was finally revealed that she’d be facing Esparza in the main event of Friday night’s TUF 20 Finale in Las Vegas, there was a windfall moment that can only be described as a kind of hysteria-in-waiting. Not a true hysteria, but a low-grade new one. The media latched onto Namajunas, because the “It” factor was strong enough to carry us away. We were just about to take the lid off the potion. Had she beat Esparza, as many books believed she would, today we’d be contemplating just how big Namajunas was going to get.

And it might have been pretty big — and it still might be pretty big, given how young and hungry she is — but not Rousey big. Because that’s impossible. Even if she didn’t invent women fighting in a cage, Rousey built the very platform for Namajunas and Esparza in the UFC. Without Rousey, there is no TUF 20. She is the architect. She took the blowtorch to Dana White’s way of thinking, and boot-trampled right past all the security checkpoints. Without Namajunas winning the belt, we just sort of say, “well, what a pity…but hey, Junior dos Santos and Stipe Miocic tonight!”

There’s a difference in transcendence levels here.

Let’s not take anything away from Esparza, though, because Esparza was never riding in on any wave other than her own. Not only did Esparza show up with sedative calm in her task to win the strawweight title, she kept the confetti from falling on her head. As has been the case so many times in this sport, she trumped a story trying to tell itself with wrestling. Wrestling! Wrestling, wrestling, wrestling. Wrestling turns a buzz into a ringing of the ears. That’s what she did to Namajunas. Her eyes were seemingly fixed just beyond where Namajunas stood. And she ran right through her.

As White always says, the best will rise to the top on TUF. And Esparza, seeded No. 1 by the matchmakers going in, was the best. She isn’t the next Ronda Rousey, but she just became the first woman to carry a UFC belt at 115 pounds. Now her and Rousey at least have that much in common. 

And as for Namajunas, there’s still plenty of time to become the world’s first — the world’s best — Rose Namajunas. And realistically, that’s not a bad place to aim.

The truth is, in the fight game there is no life as good as a delusional one, there is no time like the present, and there is no “Next Ronda Rousey.” Carla Esparza has the UFC’s inaugural strawweight belt, and Rose Namajunas, at just 22 years old, has an infinite horizon. Both are good. Neither is Rousey.

Rousey is the demolition ball that crashed through the walls of the palace. Everybody else from here on out is just running through it. She’s the original, and you can’t duplicate the original. There was never going to be another Elvis, even if Glenn Danzig put his best foot forward. Starcrash was never going to be Star Wars. If you spill paint on a canvas, you are not the next Jackson Pollock. You are just clumsy.

The idea is that we carry on in the spirit of the original thing.

I enjoyed the 20th season of The Ultimate Fighter, and it was fun to hum along to the hype-line that there was a burgeoning Ronda Rousey figure buried within the season’s contents. Can’t blame Dana White for his enthusiasm here, either. When a show stretches out for three months, best to set the expectation bar as high as possible and then deal with any shortcomings at the end. Phillipe Nover was never going to be the next Anderson Silva, but it was fun to contemplate a nurse punting Vitor Belfort’s head into the stands.

Uriah Hall was never going to replace the actual boogeyman.

At some point it was easy to assume that the Rousey-esque figure was Namajunas, the sylph-like hellcat who carries the nickname “Thug” in juxtaposition to all outward appearances. Of the contestants, she had the whole deal…looks, game, mojo, menace. She had a competitiveness that ran unsettlingly deep. As with Rousey, there were tragic back-story elements to sort out, the scaffolding beneath her intensity. As with Rousey, too, she stood at just enough of a remove from our comfort levels for human decency to make her different. There was something feral in play. She declared up front she liked to hurt people.

That, too, was endearing.

As the secret was finally revealed that she’d be facing Esparza in the main event of Friday night’s TUF 20 Finale in Las Vegas, there was a windfall moment that can only be described as a kind of hysteria-in-waiting. Not a true hysteria, but a low-grade new one. The media latched onto Namajunas, because the “It” factor was strong enough to carry us away. We were just about to take the lid off the potion. Had she beat Esparza, as many books believed she would, today we’d be contemplating just how big Namajunas was going to get.

And it might have been pretty big — and it still might be pretty big, given how young and hungry she is — but not Rousey big. Because that’s impossible. Even if she didn’t invent women fighting in a cage, Rousey built the very platform for Namajunas and Esparza in the UFC. Without Rousey, there is no TUF 20. She is the architect. She took the blowtorch to Dana White’s way of thinking, and boot-trampled right past all the security checkpoints. Without Namajunas winning the belt, we just sort of say, “well, what a pity…but hey, Junior dos Santos and Stipe Miocic tonight!”

There’s a difference in transcendence levels here.

Let’s not take anything away from Esparza, though, because Esparza was never riding in on any wave other than her own. Not only did Esparza show up with sedative calm in her task to win the strawweight title, she kept the confetti from falling on her head. As has been the case so many times in this sport, she trumped a story trying to tell itself with wrestling. Wrestling! Wrestling, wrestling, wrestling. Wrestling turns a buzz into a ringing of the ears. That’s what she did to Namajunas. Her eyes were seemingly fixed just beyond where Namajunas stood. And she ran right through her.

As White always says, the best will rise to the top on TUF. And Esparza, seeded No. 1 by the matchmakers going in, was the best. She isn’t the next Ronda Rousey, but she just became the first woman to carry a UFC belt at 115 pounds. Now her and Rousey at least have that much in common. 

And as for Namajunas, there’s still plenty of time to become the world’s first — the world’s best — Rose Namajunas. And realistically, that’s not a bad place to aim.