The UFC has its newest star. They weren’t even trying to find her. She made herself impossible to ignore, though, and by the time the arena had cleared after UFC 185, she’d staked her claim with a vicious beating and a big gold belt for her trouble.
The young lady in question is Joanna Jedrzejczyk, Polish kickboxing sensation and now second women’s strawweight champion in UFC history. If it wasn’t for the astounding success Rafael dos Anjos had only moments later against Wheaties model and then-champion Anthony Pettis, she’d have been the biggest story of the event as the UFC’s newest champion.
The fact that people are talking about her anyway, after the biggest shocker of 2015, indicates as much.
Jedrzejczyk has been in the UFC for upwards of a year now, believe it or not. With the 115-pounders prepping to populate the house for The Ultimate Fighter 20, the promotion took to starting a quiet bracket of non-housemates to jump-start the division and prepare contenders for when a champion was crowned.
Jedrzejczyk joined the likes of Tina Lahdemaki, Claudia Gadelha and Juliana Lima (who she beat in her July debut) in kick-starting the division prior to the titleholder coming out of TUF in December. That titleholder was eventually proven to be Carla Esparza, and once Jedrzejczyk defeated Gadelha, she become the first true top contender.
And what a contender she turned out to be.
The leadup to her UFC 185 title shot was the stuff of legend. She would coolly tell Esparza that the title would be leaving Dallas with her, that she was No. 1 and that Esparza shouldn’t be so quick to smile during publicity events given what was coming to her Saturday night.
She was stoic and focused in interviews, concretely confident that she was destined to become the next strawweight champion but projecting herself in a way that never crossed the line into arrogance. Despite Esparza having been a dominant force in Invicta, a horrible stylistic matchup on paper and a more experienced mixed martial arts competitor, Jedrzejczyk believed. And after a few days of watching her, you kind of did too.
Then came the fight. After a weigh-in staredown that was as intense as it was bizarre, where an expired cookie was handed from the challenger to the champion who sometimes goes by “Cookie Monster,” the two women entered the cage in Dallas to far more anticipation than anyone would have predicted when the fight was booked.
Esparza, never known for vibrant energy prior to throwing down, was even more reserved than usual. Her foe stood across the cage, intense but oddly loose, clearly prepared to dole out violence in double helpings in the name of becoming champion.
Still, the reality existed that Esparza was a tireless wrestler and the challenger was a stand-up expert from Europe, where wrestling is often neglected at the behest of creating a more spectacular highlight reel of strikes. MMA knows how striker and grappler come together; it’s been proven a thousand times. It felt like the buck was, for all intents and purposes, stopping here for Jedrzejczyk.
And then it started. A cycle of failed shots, sprawls and all manners of counter-violence from Poland’s new favorite daughter that led to a demoralized champion looking for a way out. By the end of the first round, everyone knew the fight was over—it would simply be a matter of when it would be made official.
Four minutes and seventeen seconds of the second round turned out to be the answer, as Jedrzejczyk wailed on Esparza for the duration of the round before finishing her with the type of technical lethality rarely seen in MMA. The strikes came with power and fury but were smartly and carefully chosen, and it was happening in a scintilla of time.
The ref saved the now-former champion from further damage while the two combatants were still standing, but as soon as he did, Esparza crumpled like a discarded rag while the new queen celebrated in the center of the cage.
It was a masterful performance from start to finish, start being the minute Jedrzejczyk signed on for this title fight and got to work shoring up her wrestling game, finish being the final time leather touched body before the ref decided enough was enough.
It was all perfect, and it created a new star for the UFC as it continues its quest to dominate global sports. For however ill-advised that quest is, it is the quest that the promotion has embarked upon and having a flashy, exciting champion with a knack for drawing interest in her fights is intensely valuable—even moreso when that champion is European and she’s crowned 28 days before the promotion hits her home country for the first time.
UFC 185 was a lesson in kicking down the door to stardom, and Jedrzejczyk was at the front of the classroom. Undefeated and undisputed at the top of the strawweight heap, the sky appears to be the limit for the UFC’s (almost) newest champion.
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