Women Bring Toughness to The Ultimate Fighter 18

By DJ Summers

The Jones-Gustaffson light heavyweight title fight is next Saturday, so in the meantime UFC fans have to tide themselves over with The Ultimate Fighter and its new Real World flair, complete with hot tub scenes and tears.

The second episode’s final fight was between veteran fighter Shayna Baszler (15-8) and the far less experienced Julianna Pena (4-2). Pena came out of her corner slugging in each round and got Baszler’s back for a rear naked choke. The upset was a huge blow for the morale of Baszler’s team, coached by women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey.

UFC.com

Baszler and her team are already picking up Rousey’s trash talking persona. At the weigh-in, Baszler wedged a queen of spades card into Pena’s sports bra, a reference to Baszler’s improbable Old West madam nickname. Baszler spent the first half of the episode squawking about how Pena was so inexperienced as to not warrant training and paid for her overconfidence.

Both she and Rousey bawled rivers after the fight, which brings up the elephant in the room for Season 18 of TUF. How much different is the show going to be with women in the house?

We’re already used to the fighters on TUF drinking themselves blind, challenging each other to unsanctioned matches, and destroying the house they bunk together in. With so many fighters and fighters’ egos, the aggression comes to a tipping point. Feminine emotions aren’t exactly the norm.

The addition of the women, though, already boils some unsavory elements to the surface. Fighter Anthony Gutierrez spent a segment analyzing his chances of bedding his teammates, though the ladies insist sex and romance isn’t in their agenda. Before being replaced by Louis Fisette with a torn hamstring, Tim Gorman called directly to the camera that “no girl is going to submit [him].” Some of the men say they can’t force themselves to fight 100 percent against the women, and the tension between genders is starting to pop up.

Women fighters have been a touchy subject, historically, but the clever Dana White anchored himself to the public by recently supporting them. Rousey, with her Hollywood face and attention-grabbing attitude, ushered MMA into a world where the lone women’s weight division headlines on Pay-per-view events alongside long standing men’s rivalries in the power divisions.

We saw a terrific match between Pena and Baszler, with aggression and technique. The Ultimate Fighter is a reality show, though, and its market draw is the foster a connection between the fighters and the fans before the fighters ever set foot into the Octagon. What we watch on TUF is the hairy parts of human nature, encouraged by a poolside mansion stocked with endless amounts of booze and pride.

Adding women to the mix in the sport is undoubtedly a good move. Let’s hope adding women to a reality television house full of athletes and alcohol doesn’t make the fighters act so shabbily that we hate them before they even get a chance to lose.