Rose Namajunas isn’t done fighting. She just needs to know why she’s doing it.
The former strawweight champion has been out since her UFC 324 loss to Natalia Silva, a fight in which she suffered a nasty eye poke that required surgery days later. Namajunas explained on the Weighing In podcast that the recovery was slower and stranger than it sounds.
It was like a three-month process. Right after the fight, I had to get this surgery right away. They put this weird silicone tube in my eye, and I have no idea how they did that. … It was a really easy surgery, though. It was just kind of uncomfortable. I couldn’t blow my nose. I couldn’t rub my eye or something because (the tube) could pop out, so I had to be off – no contact training for three months. Then I had my thumb – I tore my UCL in my thumb.
Cleared to train again in April, the 34-year-old still isn’t booked, and that’s deliberate. Three straight fights were sold to her as title eliminators. She lost all three.
That’s why I’ve been sitting out for a while because I’m trying to rediscover, OK, what am I doing now? To just be fairly transparent, the last three opportunities that I had, or the last three losses that I had – the Natalia fight, the Erin Blanchfield fight, and the Manon (Fiorot) fight – … I was told that I would get a title shot with a win with that fight.
Now she’s weighing what comes next, in and out of the cage.
I’m at a point in my life where I’m thinking about family stuff and all these things, and next steps, future things. So I do want to compete, and I still want to fight again, but I want to make sure that when I’m going in there, I’m going for a purpose and a reason.
Namajunas, 14-8 in MMA and 12-7 in the UFC, is targeting a return next year.
