The Four Horsewomen - Page 4
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Nickname: Rowdy Birthplace: Riverside Raised: Jamestown, N.D./Santa Monica Age: 27 Last fight: Defeated Sara McMann via TKO (knee) at 1:06 of the first round at UFC 170 at Mandalay Bay Events Cen- ter in Las Vegas on Feb. 22. Twitter: @RondaRousey Quote: “There’s no ego between any of us. Whoever has a fight coming up, we are all like your slave, pretty much. ... It’s not like it’s all about one person. It’s all about whoever’s got something coming up.” Nickname: The Supernova from Moldova Birthplace: Soroca, Moldova Raised: Albany, N.Y. Age: 26 Last fight: Defeated Chandra Engel via armbar submission at 1:57 of the first round at Chaos at the Casino 4 at Hol- lywood Park Casino in Inglewood on April 12. Twitter: @MarinaShafir Quote: “I gotta tell you, it’s like the stars are aligning for us. It’s great having them. ... I wouldn’t take anybody out, I wouldn’t put anybody in. This is perfect. This is great.” RONDA ROUSEY MARINA SHAFIR Not because I wouldn’t have loved to have that dream, but because it didn’t exist.” This was more than a year before the UFC and Spike TV launched “The Ultimate Fighter,” which is seen as the time MMA finally became part of the mainstream. But that was for men. Baszler continued to toil in more than a dozen orga- nizations. A certified EMT, Baszler often worked two jobs to support herself, in ad- dition to training and fight- ing. She won belts for pro- motions long gone by now. While the UFC was start- ing its women’s division with Rousey as its champion, Baszler went 1-2 in less than a year in Invicta Fighting Championships before be- ing selected to compete on “The Ultimate Fighter.” She was regarded as the favorite, only to be up- set by Julianna Pena in the show’s first fight. The disap- pointment eventually ebbed when she knew she would get a shot at fighting for a UFC contract. An ankle injury stalled that long-awaited debut, but Baszler got a taste for it when she cornered Duke for her UFC debut in November. Months later, she still gets goosebumps recounting it. “Finally, to hear the mu- sic and be in the arena, it was a surreal moment,” she said. “It was crazy. It was awesome.” Her time would come. The date was circled: April 16, 2014, vs. Sarah Kaufman on the “TUF Nations” finale in Quebec. But in training, Baszler threw out her hip, which led to her throwing out her back, which led to discs swelling and worse. She was bed- ridden for three days. She didn’t train effectively for 2 weeks. Knowing Baszler wasn’t 100 percent and a loss could cost her a spot in the UFC, Tarverdyan, along with Baszler mentor and UFC heavyweight Josh Barnett, made the difficult call. The fight was off. “Ohhh ... heartbroken. Heartbroken,” Shafir said of everyone’s reaction to the news. “Because aside from all the training, mental prep- aration is such a big part of that. So when you don’t really fill that mental void in your brain that, “OK, I’m fighting,” and you pull away? It’s such a tease. I could only imagine.” Baszler holed up in her room for two days, de- pressed and questioning her future in the sport. Baszler knows this: Her coaches made the right call. And a UFC fight is still com- ing her way. But she also knows, at 33, more sand is on the wrong side of the hourglass of her career. “Ultimately, I need to have a fight, to put the stamp at the end of the book. I started at the fairgrounds in an expo building where there was no- where to sit, just paid money at the door and stood around and signed up at the door to fight. They didn’t even have weigh-ins,” she said. “To start from that, to see the growth happen and finally fight in the UFC, the pin- nacle of what our sport is, I need to have that.” The one fight that could happen some day might be the biggest shocker of all. Rousey vs. Baszler. Horse- woman vs. Horsewoman. Not only do they laugh about it, they have the rou- tines, weigh-in staredowns and trash-talking down to a tee. “It’s not that much dif- ferent. We come in here, we beat each other up, then we’re all, ‘Let’s go!’ “ Rousey said. “Yeah, whenever and if ever we do fight for the belt, it’ll just be like we’re gonna throw down. And afterward, buffalo wings on me. What- ever happens.” Finally for Baszler, a dream worth having. Anticipation When Baszler lost her bout on “The Ultimate Fighter,” the biggest winner outside of Pena might have been Duke. While the Kentucky na- tive also lost her first fight via unanimous decision in an all-out brawl with Raquel Pennington, she gained a mentor. “I kinda took her under my wing,” Baszler said. “I called her my Sith appren- tice, she’s my little padawan. I’m really excited to see the growth of her happen.” Duke has been fighting professionally since 2012 and began her amateur ca- reer in 2010. But the progress she sees and feels in herself has spawned confidence. A lot of that comes not only from training with world-class female fighters, but also in learning from the champ. “We get to spar with Ronda, we get to train with Ronda,” Duke said with a smile, almost incredulous at hearing what she is say- ing. “If you think about it, we get to work with the best female fighter on the planet on a daily basis, That’s only gonna make us better. And that makes her better too. It pushes her more, makes her have to grow more.” Duke showed off what she had absorbed in a few short months with her overwhelm- ing unanimous-decision vic- tory over Peggy Morgan in November. And she’s had several more months since, leading up to her fight Satur- day against Bethe Correia on the preliminary card of UFC 172 in Baltimore. Not only has Tarverdyan broken bad habits and built upon an already steady foundation, he has molded a fighter not unlike himself. Duke and Tarverdyan have the same tall, rangy build. At 5 foot 11, Duke towers over most of her 135-pound opponents, and Tarverdyan has tailored her skills as such. Duke’s nickname might be “The Gun,” but Tarverdyan prefers to call her “Chee- pote,” which stands for “The Whip.” “It’s like I get to get inside his head a little bit on what works for him and have the right attitude and try to em- ulate him,” she said. “I watch him move a lot. I watch him spar a lot because he has a similar body type, He un- derstands why some things work and some things don’t, what’s easy and what’s not. “I feel like he gets it. It’s like someone understands that long, lanky fighter.” Duke also understands what she has been afforded: to live and train with fellow fighters, all intelligent and uniquely skilled. And Baszler sees her friend and protege able to fo- cus solely on training while not having to work two jobs, and she can’t help but get a little jealous. “If I could have had the op- portunity to be a full-time fighter while I was one of the best in the world, what could I have done then?” Baszler asks. “Jess is at a great point in her career where she has that early enough that I think she’s gonna do huge things.” Appreciation At the top of the mountain resides Rousey. This is her faction, her lair, her doing. And no one has second- guessed it for a second. “Where else would I rather be? I’m learning so much,” Duke said. As for the makeup of the group, everyone brings something to the table. When asked how to define everyone, Rousey puts it this way — as only she can. “Marina is like the level- headed mommy, the reason- able one. And then I would say that Jessamyn is like the sweet, cuddly, always- in-a-good-mood one. She’s the one you randomly walk up to and hug in the house,” she said. “And then Shayna is our navigator of Reddit. We all just sit around the TV and watch Shayna surf Red- dit and we laugh our asses off together. And she’s definitely more like the showman of ev- erybody. She’s very much the entertainer of the group.” Rousey has deemed her- self the slob of the bunch, dirty dishes and clothes in her wake. But she’s also the king of the pride, defender of the li- onesses. “I feel like they do all the work and I just eat every- thing that they just bring and prepare for me,” Rousey said. “And if anyone messes with them, I’ll rip off their face. And that’s my job.” The truth is, there is nothing Rousey requires or wants from them. Baszler says the depth of gratitude for Rousey is im- possible to quantify. “It can’t be measured what she’s done for us. You can’t make a list of things she’s bought or something like that,” Baszler said. “It’s not a measurable thing. It’s the opportunities she’s given us.” Shafir sums up The Four Horsewomen as “a beautiful thing that happened.” “They’re my sisters. They’re my teammates,” she said. “I’d take a bullet for those girls.” Ronda Rousey, Shayna Baszler, Marina Shafir and Jessamyn Duke watch WWE Monday Night Raw at their Venice home. Jessamyn Duke and Marina Shafir use the Santa Monica Stairs for a workout. The women push and encourage each other during training, especially if one of them has an upcoming fight. 9-0 1-0 MMA FROM PAGE 7 FRIDAY, APRIL 25, 2014 LOS ANGELES NEWS GROUP | SPORTS | 7 B
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Transcript of The Four Horsewomen - Page 4
Nickname: Rowdy Birthplace: RiversideRaised: Jamestown, N.D./Santa Monica Age: 27Last fight: Defeated Sara McMann via TKO (knee) at 1:06 of the first round at UFC 170 at Mandalay Bay Events Cen-ter in Las Vegas on Feb. 22.Twitter: @RondaRouseyQuote: “There’s no ego between any of us. Whoever has a fight coming up, we are all like your slave, pretty much. ... It’s not like it’s all about one person. It’s all about whoever’s got something coming up.”
Nickname: The Supernova from Moldova Birthplace: Soroca, MoldovaRaised: Albany, N.Y. Age: 26Last fight: Defeated Chandra Engel via armbar submission at 1:57 of the first round at Chaos at the Casino 4 at Hol-lywood Park Casino in Inglewood on April 12.Twitter: @MarinaShafirQuote: “I gotta tell you, it’s like the stars are aligning for us. It’s great having them. ... I wouldn’t take anybody out, I wouldn’t put anybody in. This is perfect. This is great.”
RONDA ROUSEY MARINA SHAFIR
Not because I wouldn’t have loved to have that dream, but because it didn’t exist.”
This was more than a year before the UFC and Spike TV launched “The Ultimate Fighter,” which is seen as the time MMA finally became part of the mainstream.
But that was for men.Baszler continued to toil
in more than a dozen orga-nizations. A certified EMT, Baszler often worked two jobs to support herself, in ad-dition to training and fight-ing.
She won belts for pro-motions long gone by now. While the UFC was start-ing its women’s division with Rousey as its champion, Baszler went 1-2 in less than a year in Invicta Fighting Championships before be-ing selected to compete on “The Ultimate Fighter.”
She was regarded as the favorite, only to be up-set by Julianna Pena in the show’s first fight. The disap-pointment eventually ebbed when she knew she would get a shot at fighting for a UFC contract.
An ankle injury stalled that long-awaited debut, but Baszler got a taste for it when she cornered Duke for her UFC debut in November.
Months later, she still gets goosebumps recounting it.
“Finally, to hear the mu-sic and be in the arena, it was a surreal moment,” she said. “It was crazy. It was awesome.”
Her time would come. The date was circled: April 16, 2014, vs. Sarah Kaufman on the “TUF Nations” finale in Quebec.
But in training, Baszler threw out her hip, which led to her throwing out her back, which led to discs swelling and worse. She was bed-ridden for three days. She didn’t train effectively for 2 1/2 weeks.
Knowing Baszler wasn’t 100 percent and a loss could cost her a spot in the UFC, Tarverdyan, along with Baszler mentor and UFC heavyweight Josh Barnett, made the difficult call.
The fight was off.“Ohhh ... heartbroken.
Heartbroken,” Shafir said of everyone’s reaction to the news. “Because aside from all the training, mental prep-aration is such a big part of that. So when you don’t really fill that mental void in your brain that, “OK, I’m fighting,” and you pull away? It’s such a tease. I could only imagine.”
Baszler holed up in her room for two days, de-pressed and questioning her future in the sport.
Baszler knows this: Her coaches made the right call. And a UFC fight is still com-ing her way.
But she also knows, at 33, more sand is on the wrong side of the hourglass of her career.
“Ultimately, I need to have a fight, to put the stamp at the end of the book. I started at the fairgrounds in an expo building where there was no-where to sit, just paid money at the door and stood around and signed up at the door to fight. They didn’t even have
weigh-ins,” she said. “To start from that, to see the growth happen and finally fight in the UFC, the pin-nacle of what our sport is, I need to have that.”
The one fight that could happen some day might be the biggest shocker of all.
Rousey vs. Baszler. Horse-woman vs. Horsewoman.
Not only do they laugh about it, they have the rou-tines, weigh-in staredowns and trash-talking down to a tee.
“It’s not that much dif-ferent. We come in here, we beat each other up, then we’re all, ‘Let’s go!’ “ Rousey said. “Yeah, whenever and if ever we do fight for the belt, it’ll just be like we’re gonna throw down. And afterward, buffalo wings on me. What-ever happens.”
Finally for Baszler, a dream worth having.
AnticipationWhen Baszler lost her
bout on “The Ultimate Fighter,” the biggest winner outside of Pena might have been Duke.
While the Kentucky na-tive also lost her first fight via unanimous decision in an all-out brawl with Raquel Pennington, she gained a mentor.
“I kinda took her under my wing,” Baszler said. “I called her my Sith appren-tice, she’s my little padawan. I’m really excited to see the growth of her happen.”
Duke has been fighting professionally since 2012 and began her amateur ca-reer in 2010.
But the progress she sees and feels in herself has spawned confidence.
A lot of that comes not only from training with world-class female fighters, but also in learning from the champ.
“We get to spar with Ronda, we get to train with Ronda,” Duke said with a smile, almost incredulous at hearing what she is say-ing. “If you think about it, we get to work with the best female fighter on the planet on a daily basis, That’s only gonna make us better. And that makes her better too. It
pushes her more, makes her have to grow more.”
Duke showed off what she had absorbed in a few short months with her overwhelm-ing unanimous-decision vic-tory over Peggy Morgan in November. And she’s had several more months since, leading up to her fight Satur-day against Bethe Correia on the preliminary card of UFC 172 in Baltimore.
Not only has Tarverdyan broken bad habits and built upon an already steady foundation, he has molded a fighter not unlike himself.
Duke and Tarverdyan have the same tall, rangy build. At 5 foot 11, Duke towers over most of her 135-pound opponents, and Tarverdyan has tailored her skills as such.
Duke’s nickname might be “The Gun,” but Tarverdyan prefers to call her “Chee-pote,” which stands for “The Whip.”
“It’s like I get to get inside his head a little bit on what works for him and have the right attitude and try to em-ulate him,” she said. “I watch
him move a lot. I watch him spar a lot because he has a similar body type, He un-derstands why some things work and some things don’t, what’s easy and what’s not.
“I feel like he gets it. It’s like someone understands that long, lanky fighter.”
Duke also understands what she has been afforded: to live and train with fellow fighters, all intelligent and uniquely skilled.
And Baszler sees her friend and protege able to fo-cus solely on training while not having to work two jobs, and she can’t help but get a little jealous.
“If I could have had the op-portunity to be a full-time fighter while I was one of the best in the world, what could I have done then?” Baszler asks. “Jess is at a great point in her career where she has that early enough that I think she’s gonna do huge things.”
AppreciationAt the top of the mountain
resides Rousey.This is her faction, her
lair, her doing.And no one has second-
guessed it for a second.“Where else would I
rather be? I’m learning so much,” Duke said.
As for the makeup of the group, everyone brings something to the table.
When asked how to define everyone, Rousey puts it this way — as only she can.
“Marina is like the level-headed mommy, the reason-able one. And then I would say that Jessamyn is like the sweet, cuddly, always-in-a-good-mood one. She’s the one you randomly walk up to and hug in the house,” she said. “And then Shayna is our navigator of Reddit. We all just sit around the TV and watch Shayna surf Red-dit and we laugh our asses off together. And she’s definitely more like the showman of ev-erybody. She’s very much the entertainer of the group.”
Rousey has deemed her-self the slob of the bunch, dirty dishes and clothes in her wake.
But she’s also the king of the pride, defender of the li-onesses.
“I feel like they do all the work and I just eat every-thing that they just bring and prepare for me,” Rousey said. “And if anyone messes with them, I’ll rip off their face. And that’s my job.”
The truth is, there is nothing Rousey requires or wants from them.
Baszler says the depth of gratitude for Rousey is im-possible to quantify.
“It can’t be measured what she’s done for us. You can’t make a list of things she’s bought or something like that,” Baszler said. “It’s not a measurable thing. It’s the opportunities she’s given us.”
Shafir sums up The Four Horsewomen as “a beautiful thing that happened.”
“They’re my sisters. They’re my teammates,” she said. “I’d take a bullet for those girls.”
Ronda Rousey, Shayna Baszler, Marina Shafir and Jessamyn Duke watch WWE Monday Night Raw at their Venice home.
Jessamyn Duke and Marina Shafir use the Santa Monica Stairs for a workout. The women push and encourage each other during training, especially if one of them has an upcoming fight.
9-0 1-0
MMAFROM PAGE 7
FRIDAY, APRIL 25, 2014 LOS ANGELES NEWS GROUP | SPORTS | 7 B
