Peggy Morgan’s TUF 18 Fighter Blog Week 6: Reaching the Breaking Point

I’m just going to start out by admitting that I am insanely jealous of my teammate, Jessamyn Duke. Obviously, everyone who goes into The Ultimate Fighter enters the tournament hoping to win the whole thing, but the next best thing (and sometimes equally good) is to fight the fight of a lifetime on the show. And Jessamyn did just that.

As spectators, we walked into the gym for Jessamyn and Rocky’s fight with significantly less energy than we’d had walking in for Shayna’ and Julianna’s fight. In general, we were all getting burned out and tired and even a little bored of watching each other fight. I mean, it’s pretty much all we’d been doing for three weeks. But a minute into the first round, all that changed.

The atmosphere in the UFC training center was electric. At that point, I was in peak zombie form, but that fight managed to rouse even me from my torpor. I was yelling and clenching my fists and sweating like a little piglet by the end. It was just that good.

At the end of the third round, I honestly had no idea which of them had won, but I knew I’d just seen an amazing fight. Jessamyn may not have been awarded the decision, but I would in no way consider that fight a loss. Without question, that fight will do great things not only for Jessamyn’s career, but also for WMMA in general. I don’t want to sound corny, but after watching it, I was legit proud to be a female fighter.

Back at the house, things were starting to get rowdy. As more fighters were eliminated from the tournament, people were staying up late and drinking, so consequently there were more conflicts.

A major conflict that didn’t make the airwaves occurred between Chris Beal and Louis-Who-Lives-With-His-Parents. Some of the members of Team Tate were displeased with Louis after his fight with Davey because they felt he showed a lack of heart. Cody Bollinger was particularly disgruntled, saying, “He didn’t have the energy to fight back, but then he had the energy to pick Davey up and carry him around the cage after the fight ended? B.S.!”

In the hours following his loss, Louis showed few signs of regret. I remember sitting on the patio with him, watching him eat a bowl of ice cream, and joke around about the small cut above his eye and thinking, “doesn’t losing bother you at all?” At the same time, I realized that different people deal with things differently, and I suspected that Louis really was upset by his own performance and was just putting up a happy front. Not everyone shared my perspective, though.

That night, a group of fighters were upstairs drinking when Chris Beal started ribbing Louis. I was in bed with ear plugs in and slept through the whole thing, but the next morning, I heard that Beal kept verbally jabbing Louis until Louis snapped and told Beal to “shut your mouth before I stick my (expletive) in it.”

Not surprisingly, that didn’t go over too well and Beal went off, telling Louis that he didn’t even belong in the house and that if Beal got a chance to fight Louis at the finale, he would mess him up.

Like Jessamyn, I wasn’t particularly psyched by the prospect of attending a pool party. At that point, I was five days out from weigh-ins for my own fight, and I knew there was going to be a lot of good food there to torture me. I didn’t really have a valid excuse to stay home, though, so I went.

It was more fun than I’d anticipated. The best part of the whole evening for me came at the end when they turned music on for a few minutes. It was the first time I’d heard music in weeks, and I stretched out in one of the lounge chairs and closed my eyes and soaked it in. Then one of the producers yelled for them to shut the music off, and that was that.

Y’all saw Anthony getting a little belligerent after we got home from the pool party, but you didn’t see how that particular incident ended. After Rocky asked Anthony to keep it down, he continued to sit on the sofa outside their bedroom screaming obscenities at Julianna so loudly that we could hear him in our bedroom downstairs. I’m not 100-perceny sure I heard him correctly because it was a little muffled, but I’m pretty sure he was yelling something like, “Everyone hates Julianna because she’s a stupid bitch! I’d (expletive) her, but then it’d be like sleeping with 22,987,536 other people!”

That’s the transcript I recorded in my journal anyway. At any rate, I was getting aggravated by the whole thing. Jessamyn was cutting weight, and all the yelling was keeping her awake. Moreover, I was actually getting kind of sick of people dumping on Julianna all the time. So I went upstairs and politely asked Anthony to shut the eff up. He said sorry and agreed to stop, but as soon as I started walking down the stairs again, he started up again. “Anthony!” I yelled. “Shut the (expletive) up!” That was probably the first and only time anyone in the house ever heard me yell, and I think it freaked him out a little because he said, “Whoa, Pegatron!” and immediately stopped yelling.

Personally, I’d reached a point where the experience was really starting to grind on me. I was tired of waiting to fight and of the perpetual weight cut that came along with it. I wrote in my journal, “Anyone who doubts that time is relative should spend a week in the TUF house. Every day feels like a month.”

I never stopped being grateful for the opportunity, but at the same time, I just really wanted to get into the cage. Being the last female fight, I knew that after Michael Wooten and Josh Hill fought, it would finally be my turn.

Team Rousey’s Peggy Morgan is blogging exclusively for MMAWeekly.com readers throughout the Team Rousey vs. Team Tate season. You can follow her on Twitter @PeggyMorganMMA.