Amanda Nunes thought Julianna Pena would talk more trash. Pena didn’t want to “kick a dog when it’s down.” Suffice to say, The Ultimate Fighter 30 wasn’t what either expected.
Two days from their showdown, two months removed from each other’s shows, UFC 277 will host the rematch of Pena’s shocking upset at UFC 269..
UFC fighters on TUF often talk about the information gleaned from time on set with their rivals. Nunes just stood there, shaking her head.
” I just think that she’s strange,” Nunes stated about Pena during the UFC 277 media conference. “But she’s in her own world, and I just did my own thing, so we didn’t see each other that much.
” We only saw one another a few times during the fights, but she was busy on her cell phone doing some other thing and not looking at me. Do you know what? You stay there. You can stay there.
” I didn’t know anything about her. … She’s just, I don’t know, she’s in her own world. So I didn’t even want to interact with anything.”
Pena heard Nunes’ comments and countered that she was taking it easy on a legend who’d been dethroned and was badly losing the competition portion of TUF 30.
Regardless of the reasons, Nunes was not able to generate enough excitement for the bantamweight champion and featherweight champ to make it through fight week. Nunes didn’t need any extra motivation to fight again.
She was a former champ-champ seven months back when she climbed off UFC 269’s octagon with an unsettling thought in her mind. She had lost her arms in the first round against Pena.
“I really didn’t know what happened right after,” Nunes said. “When I got up from the floor, I was like, ‘What the f*** is going on?'”
Nunes said she hadn’t fully recovered from a bout of COVID-19 in training camp. She wasn’t herself in the octagon, and she and those closest to her knew it.
” “It was just an awful camp, it was,” she stated. But for some reason, I felt the need to be there
She took the gamble, and it massively backfired. She had only one belt left.
Pena submitted to Nunes and she considered quitting the sport. She reasoned that she had accomplished all she set out to, including winning a couple of titles and setting up her family for financial independence.
As soon as she got back to the hotel, she said, “I was kind of like, sad-hungry, at the same time.”
Nunes could have flown back from Las Vegas, but she decided to drive back to Florida with her partner Nina Nunes and their daughter Reagan. That way, she would have time to think, and to formulate a plan.
Nunes decided to quit American Top Team when she returned home and start her own gym. Nunes built the facility together with her family and hung every fight banner on the gym walls. She selected the rhythms of the training and chose the routines.
Nunes stated that she did not need anything from Pena for the set of The Ultimate Fighter .. She needed to feel normal again. Pena, whether a trash-talking snob or an absentee presence who left no impression, took control of her destiny.
On Saturday at American Airlines Center in Dallas, Nunes will own the outcome of the rematch, and it may be her final statement — or the start of her next chapter.
“This is the opponent I needed,” she stated. She brought back that spark .”
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