UFC WOMEN’S STRAWWEIGHT champion Rose Namajunas has revealed the extent of her fear as Conor McGregor and his entourage attacked a bus containing Namajunas and several other fighters following a media event on Thursday.
Namajunas escaped injury – unlike Michael Chiesa and Ray Borg who were both pulled from their respective UFC 223 fights on Saturday – but was rumoured to be close to withdrawing from her own title defence due to psychological trauma.
Instead, the 25-year-old American of Lithuanian descent produced a career-best display as she bested all-time great Joanna Jedrzejczyk in their immediate rematch, but Namajunas maintains events in the loading dock of Barclays Center probably detracted from her overall performance.
Providing her version of events on Ariel Helwani’s MMA Hour, Namajunas said:
“Initially I just didn’t know what the hell was happening: I saw the dolly come at the window and I didn’t know it was Conor until later. And then I kind of slowly put together that they were probably after Khabib [Nurmagomedov], or whoever, but [at the time] in my head I didn’t know if it was a terrorist attack or what was going on.
“Gosh, man. I was getting ready – I thought they were going to come on the bus. I didn’t know if I was going to get stomped, or [if there were going to be] bullets , or…
Because especially, too, everybody inside [the bus] wanted to go out and fight with them, and that’s cool if y’all want to do that, but I’m like: ‘I want to get the fuck out of here.’ And when the window broke I’m like: ‘Y’all can jump out the window, but just keep the door closed.’ It was just a dumb, ignorant act of like… I don’t know. I just wanted to go have the [Jedrzejczyk] fight, man! [I thought:] ‘I don’t actually want to get into a street fight right now.’
There was glass all over my back, but I ducked. The first thing I saw – I don’t know who it was – but I just saw a really big fist hit my window. It was like: ‘Boom! Boom! Boom!’
Namajunas revealed she might have been injured if the bus hadn’t been in transit at the time of McGregor’s rampage; her fortune, though, was Chiesa and Borg’s misfortune, as their window was shattered while the bus reversed briefly.
“Then there was more people” – she said, “security guards taking a guy… We were eventually surrounded, so I’m just trying to make sense of what’s going on – and who [is attacking the bus]. And I’m like: ‘Nah, that’s not cool.’ Something told me it was going to keep escalating. And it wouldn’t stop.
So the bus is trying to leave, but the bus elevator [out of the arena] is slow, so we’re sitting ducks, pretty much. If we get out of the bus, we don’t know what we’re up against, really, at this point, because we don’t know how many of them there are or what their intentions are: ‘Are they coming to kill somebody? Are they coming for a fight? I don’t know.’
“All these thoughts are going into my head, and I’m like: ‘Okay, this is serious.’ And then out of my peripheral I saw something coming towards the window, and it was the dolly. And the bus is moving backwards, so it was coming towards my window but because the bus is moving backwards it hit the window in front of me [where Michael Chiesa and Ray Borg were sitting].
I ended up ducking right at the right time. After that point I just ducked my head the entire time – I didn’t look out the window or anything. I was just trying to like make sure nobody was coming on the bus.
“I saw that we were getting on the elevator – and still stuff was flying, but I knew by the time we got in the elevator everything should be good.
“I kind of put it behind me the next day [Friday]. It took me the whole day to kind of process what happened. I had a bad sleep that night, but the next day was good.”
Namajunas remarked after her stellar points victory that she had felt a touch heavy on her feet, apologising to supporters for supposedly abandoning some of the technical approach which had seen her bomb the Polish former champion out inside a round just five months ago.
Asked by Helwani what she meant by these comments – her overall performance, by any metric, was rather sensational – Namajunas explained that she had struggled mentally in the lead-up to her first title defence – even prior to the attack on her bus.
“[I just had] a lot of anxiety, a lot of emotions,” she said.
I don’t know – I just felt like I had an adrenaline dump before the fight, you know? With Conor, Khabib and all that stuff beforehand; not knowing if I’m the main event, co-main event, and going back and forth.
“Even before the fight I was squeezing my fist so hard while getting my hands taped, and when I turned my hand over I was bleeding for some reason. I don’t know how that happened. And the cut on my other hand was bleeding too.
“I guess it was good for me to prepare my mind – that this was not going to be an easy one. It was also hard to accept that, but I did.
The whole time I knew I just had to get into the ring and I’d be fine, but there was many moments… Usually I get to the arena and I’m fine – there’s no turning back – but there was many moments where I was like: ‘I really don’t want to do this, guys.’ I said to Pat [Barry, her partner and trainer]: ‘It’s not turning on!’ And he got so mad at me, but… We said that we might get the whole way down to fight week, and still not be feeling it the whole time.
Barry, who was in the couple’s kitchen preparing food while Namajunas spoke with Helwani, suggested the pressure of the fight itself was far more testing than the unsavoury incidents which preceded it:
“It’s the stress and anxiety that comes along with fighting Joanna Jedrzejczyk! She’s one of the greatest of all time. That was the best she’s ever been. We knew that.
“‘Maybe it was a fluke [when Namajunas beat Jedrzejczyk the first time].’ It wasn’t a fluke! We knew that at one moment she was going to show up. There was a lot of stress – that belt is heavy.”
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