The Ultimate Fighter: Laughs, Tears, and Maybe Some Fights

 By DJ Summers

In the wake of an incredible light heavyweight UFC title fight, The Ultimate Fighter shows us just how much worse things can get when we throw dignity out the window. At this point, it’s not unthinkable that the Real Housewives crowd might tune in.

There was a fight, too, which is fun if you’re into that kind of thing.

This is the first co-ed TUF and its directors evidently still link cross-gender training with summer camp, including the no kissing rule that teammates have followed up to this point. The fighters all played a game of Truth or Dare, centered mostly around finding out who’s going to try to sleep with who.

When asked about an insult directed at housemate Louis Fisette, fighter Anthony Gutierrez explains, “If you play Truth or Dare long enough, someone’s going to get offended.” His mastery of Truth or Dare politics is impressive, clearly, and proves that no matter what we see on TUF, it can always get more juvenile. That fact is astounding, and might just reaffirm the Godless folks’ faith in miracles.

Photo Courtesy of MMA Online

At that point in the show,  coach Ronda Rousey’s mother bursts into the training regimen to criticize her daughter’s fighters and the mixed martial arts community in general for their mistreatment of her daughter. Mother Rousey can chalk her daughter’s behavior up to her own child-rearing, but the “mistreatment” of her daughter is a fabrication.

Ronda Rousey’s attention-grabbing behavior turns a lot of people off. It also turned her into a millionaire, the lynch pin of an important gender equality debate, and secured her advertising rights and movie deals. Her arrogance is her appeal, and with Mother Rousey on set we get a glimpse of where it comes from.

Ronda tells about her mother’s training methods, some of which we knew and some of which were surprises. Mother Rousey would often send her injured daughter to judo competitions. From their bearing and physicality, it’s plain that Ronda idolizes and fears her mother, that winning was stressed in their family,  and that it was secondary to manners. How much Ronda talks about her mother in her day-today

interviews was a dead giveaway, but last night’s TUF made it visible.

Later Mother Rousey visits her daughter’s fighter Davey Grant pre-fight and tells him that having children made her stronger, which clearly worked wonders for her and means nothing useful for Grant.

The fight between Louis Fisette and Davey Grant ended in the second round with a rear naked choked by Grant. Fisette lifted his opponent into the air in what looked like a play by Team Tate to shame Team Rousey’s predictable flow of trash talk. Both teams have two wins and two losses.

Grant’s ground game was surprisingly good, despite being matched with Fisette, who wasn’t a great challenge.

The rest of the show gave us some entertainment staples. We got to see some sexuality between cast members, some name-calling, some mother-daughter dynamics, and some advice from an elder. If it were an episode of Big Bang Theory, the studio audience would laugh, hoot, and coo. Their intermittent fights better not get in the way of their CBS auditions; it would be a shame to lose such great personalities to a silly thing like sport.