My Fight / Your Fight (34 page)

There were two huge photos of me and Cat on the wall. The doors opened, and I expected Cat to come walking through them. Instead, it was Miesha Tate. She was smiling. I was caught off guard, but I had to laugh.

Cat must have brought Miesha in as one of her assistant coaches
, I thought.
Cat knows our backstory and wanted to fuck with me. Touché.

“I knew they were going to set me up with something,” I blurted out.

I didn't like Miesha, but I respected her for providing me a rivalry and a good fight when I had needed one. “Nice to see you again.”

“Nice to see you too,” she said.

The last time we had been this physically close together, the referee was raising my arm in victory.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I'm here to coach,” Miesha said.

“Coach what?” I asked.

“That's what you're here to do, right?”

The confusion set in.

“Are you helping Cat's team out?” I asked.

“I'll leave the explaining to Dana, but . . .” Miesha trailed off and just stood there smirking.

Understanding crashed down on me as if one of the lights from the gym ceiling had fallen on my head: Dana was making an example of me. He was showing me what happened when you messed with the UFC. He was replacing me with my worst enemy.

Panic set in. I thought about how much my team of coaches had already put into the show, how they had put their lives on hold in order to help me. How was I going to tell my team? Where was Dana? How could he betray me like this? I was furious. I was hurt. I could feel the emotion washing over my face.

It's strange the things that push a person over the edge. Miesha Tate could try to punch me in the face. She could belittle my fighting ability. She could disregard everything I had accomplished. None of that had fazed me. But the way she was smirking at me, savoring my anguish, set something off. I went from disliking her to having never loathed someone so much in my entire life. What had started as a promotional rivalry became real animosity.

It is one thing to be against someone while you're fighting in the Octagon. That's business. It is another thing to take pleasure in someone else's unhappiness outside of it. That is just fucked up. Seeing the pleasure and satisfaction she got from my distress was too much. I never like anyone when she is standing across from me in the cage. But if I saw that same girl outside that setting, in a complete panic, I wouldn't laugh at her. I would say, “Hey, it's cool. Chill out.”

That is the difference between me and Miesha Tate.

I pushed through the doors Miesha had just walked through.

“Where's Dana?” I started asking everyone in the halls. No one would tell me; it would have ruined the opportunity to turn my panic and embarrassment into reality TV gold. I walked to the locker room area.

When Dana arrived, I was flipping out.

“Let me explain,” he said.

Days earlier, Cat Zingano had injured her knee. She needed major knee surgery and was going to be out for months. The morning we were supposed to start filming, Cat was in an operating room. The UFC called Miesha. She and I would coach opposite each other on the show, then fight at the conclusion of the season.

It was all a misunderstanding, Dana said.

I looked around at the camera crew filming the entire scene. The cameraman was smiling.

This wasn't a misunderstanding
, I thought.
This was an ambush.

I had been naïve enough to believe that because the show was affiliated with the UFC, the producers would be respectful of the fighters. The UFC bankrolls the show, but the production company, Pilgrim, treats you like a reality TV show personality. They don't see you as a world-class, elite-level fighter who deserves respect and who fights for her life for a living.

It was a rough first day. Things would only get worse.

Following the show's formulaic format, we selected our teams, but this season we selected four girls and four guys each, and two winners—a man and a woman—would be crowned at the end of season.

I selected: Shayna Baszler, Jessamyn Duke, Peggy Morgan, Jessica Rakoczy, Chris Beal, Davey Grant, Anthony Gutierrez, and Michael Wootten. Miesha picked: Julianna Peña, Sarah Moras, Raquel Pennington, Roxanne Modafferi, Cody Bollinger, Chris Holdsworth, Josh Hill, and Tim Gorman (who was hurt and replaced by Louis Fisette).

Based off a coin flip, I got to pick the first matchup of the season. I put my first women's pick, Shayna, up against hers, Julianna. One of the most experienced women's MMA fighters and in many ways an unsung pioneer in the sport, there was no fucking way Shayna was going to lose.

But Shayna lost, getting caught in a rear-naked choke in the second round. During the fight, I could tell Shayna felt like she was losing the round. I saw her focus shift away from what she was doing in the cage at that second to what she was going to do in the next round. That's when she got caught.

It was a gut-wrenching defeat for Shayna and our entire team. I did not want the defeat to set the tone for the next six weeks. The entire ride back to my temporary apartment, I thought about the fight. I thought about it that evening. I thought about it on the way to the gym the next morning. I thought about how Miesha had celebrated the fact that Shayna—whom Miesha claimed was her friend—was being crushed under the pieces of her shattered dream. As the coach, I was responsible for the team's morale.

When I thought about what I could say, I thought about what my mom used to tell me: “In every match, there is a second when the gold medal is up for grabs. The only way to make sure that you are the one who grabs it is to make sure that you fight every single second of that match.”

My mom's words echoing in my head, I called my team together.

“You will have times where you are behind,” I began. “Frontrunners are a dime a dozen. It's easy to stay in the game when you're winning. What sets the special fighters apart is the ability to battle beyond your greatest losses and adversities.”

By the time I got to “. . . It is about winning every single second of your life,” there wasn't a person on my team who wasn't ready go out and beat someone up. I saw a light in their eyes, a fire that hadn't been there before. We trained right after I spoke, and everyone was focused. The team's spirit was high, but it was also serious. No one was joking and smiling. They were going at it twice as hard as they had been the day before.

I put so much thought into those words. The kids were so into it. Several of us got the words tattooed onto ourselves after the season ended. If viewers had seen the speech, they would have been thunderstruck. Instead the producers put in a hot tub scene.

Since her fighter won, Miesha got to pick the next fight. She pitted Chris Holdsworth against my guy Chris Beal. Chris Beal's hand was broken in his initial fight to get into the house and Miesha openly acknowledged that she wanted to exploit that.

What was not shown was what happened in the moments leading up to his fight. Chris Beal was warming up, when Dana came into the locker room, upset because he had just received a call from another fight promoter who said Chris was still under contract with him. Chris wasn't yet in the cage, and he was already being forced to defend himself.

When we were filming, no one aside from us knew the cast. How would anyone even know Chris was on the show? What are the odds that this promoter would call at the most inopportune time, moments before the biggest fight of his life? Who would stand to benefit the most? What is the probability of all these factors colliding at the exact moment when it would most negatively impact a member of my team? My mom, who is a statistician, always says, “If something is highly, highly improbable, it is probably not a coincidence.”

We hadn't even been filming a week, but it was crystal clear that producers were more interested in making a show about catfighing than cage-fighting. Whenever Miesha walked by me, she would sneer or blow me a kiss. She made snarky comments about my coaches and played juvenile pranks. The producers gobbled it up.

“Just take her outside and kick her fucking ass,” my mom said when I flew her in to serve as a guest coach.

Everyone involved with the show saw the situation spiraling out of control. Dana called me and Miesha in to talk and demanded both sides cut the bullshit. But Miesha kept blowing me kisses and looking to start problems with my team. They especially targeted Edmond, who as our only striking coach, was absolutely essential to the team. Miesha and her troll of a boyfriend purposely agitated Edmond, trying to instigate fights and get him kicked off the show. I held myself and my team back from engaging in any further confrontations, but kept flipping her the bird.

It was only July, but I was counting down the days until December 28, when I could take it all out on her in the cage. I just hoped I could hold myself back until then.

My only goal on the show was to take my team of aspiring fighters and put all of my efforts into mentoring them. I know how hard it is to scratch and claw your way up through the sport. I know how hard it is to juggle multiple jobs while training so you can make ends meet. I understood that succeeding on
The Ultimate Fighter
could change the trajectory of a fighter's career. The kids on my team needed this chance. They deserved every piece of my being that I could give to them. If I was made to look like a crazy bitch as a result, I accepted that.

I decided long ago that I'm going to say whatever I'm going to say, and people are just going to take it however they want. I wasn't going to waste a single second caring about what anyone else thought.

You have to ask yourself, “What is the worst thing that could happen? What is the worst possible outcome?” When I'm fighting, the worst that could happen is that I'll die or be permanently maimed. For pretty much everything else, the answer is the worst that could happen is I'll suck or make myself look like an idiot. Compared to dying, that's pretty low on the scale of bad things that could happen. Fighting really puts everything in perspective and keeps me from being afraid.

I had always known fighting wouldn't last forever. I was achieving my goals at a faster pace than even I had expected. And now I was looking ahead to the future. I wanted to parlay my fighting success into a next step, just as Gina Carano had done when she made the move from fighting to film. This seemed like a nearly impossible challenge; those were my favorite kind, but first I wanted to talk to Edmond.

One morning at GFC, I was sitting next to Edmond on the edge of the ring during a break in my workout when I told him about a meeting I had recently had with an entertainment agent who thought I could be a Hollywood star. I asked him what he thought about me trying to do movies. By now, I could usually gauge how Edmond would respond to an idea, but this time, I didn't know what to expect.

The sole purpose of a trainer is to get fighters ready for a fight. Coaches are not fans of “outside distractions.” He paused, thinking about everything I had told him.

“Is it because you really want to act? Like you are passionate about acting?” he asked. “Or is it you just want the status of being famous in your movies?”

“I really do want to act and I really want to be good at it,” I said. “For some reason, I feel compelled to entertain.”

Edmond paused again.

“You can't carry two watermelons together in your hands,” he said, holding out his hands as if to show me. “It doesn't work that way.”

I couldn't help but smile at the analogy. Armenians have a big thing about watermelons.

“But you know what you are doing,” he continued. “Most fighters, I would say, ‘No, focus on fighting.' But if you can keep it serious and do both, do both. Just remember, it is because of fighting you have these movies.”

He was saying aloud what I already knew. I was under no illusions that Hollywood would care about me if I was not the UFC champion. If I were to lose a fight, I would just be one more blonde aspiring actress in a city of blonde aspiring actresses.

“But I will tell you one thing,” Edmond said. “This is a gym. You walk into this gym and I don't want to hear about no movies. When we do training camps, you focus on nothing else. When you're out there, you do what you want to do, but in here, all we do is fight.

“Now, back in the ring,” he said.

I jumped up, determined to prove to him that I was more dedicated to fighting than ever.

Before I became ensnared in
The Ultimate Fighter
, I'd been laying groundwork for an acting career. I'd signed with the entertainment agent, Brad Slater from the William Morris Endeavor agency, and was going to meetings with producers, studio executives, and casting people. I got an acting coach. I had even been up for the role of Atalanta in
Hercules.
I tried so hard to get that role, and when they didn't pick me I was really disappointed. It was a loss and it bothered me. Whenever I had a hard time on TUF, I'd think,
Fuck, I want to be in Hercules.

Then, Brad called to tell me that Sylvester Stallone wanted to meet me. I was an unknown in Hollywood, and he was Rocky and Rambo and Barney from
The Expendables.

We went to lunch with Kevin King, Stallone's producing partner, and the man himself. They were doing a third
Expendables
movie, and Stallone thought maybe I would be a good fit for the part.

I was flattered. Stallone asked me what I thought of acting, and I said I was working hard to get better at it.

“I always felt like you had to be a good liar to be a good actor,” I admitted. “But I've started realizing it's not so much telling a lie as it's convincing yourself that you are in this situation, then doing whatever you would do in that situation.”