Did Rose Namajunas retire before making flyweight debut? 'Thug' contemplated walking away after disappointing title loss to Carla Esparza
Former UFC strawweight champion Rose Namajunas was thinking about retirement before making a move up to flyweight.
The 31-year-old made her flyweight debut on September 2. The event took place at the Accor Arena in Paris, France.
But moving up was not always the plan. There was a time 'Thug' was contemplating hanging up her gloves. This happened after her loss to Carla Esparza at UFC 274.
In an interview with Ariel Helwani for The MMA Hour, the 31-year-old revealed after UFC 274, she felt she had lost her aggression and did not want to hurt anyone. Rose Namajunas then spoke about how different factors led to her contemplating retirement from the sport.
"I definitely thought I was done for a good amount of time. I was just kind of like—There’s definitely a number of things, but the way that I felt in the locker room, I just didn’t feel aggressive and I felt like I don’t really want to hurt anybody. So I was just like, ‘I guess I’m done... After Carla, it was kind of like, I forgot exactly all the factors. I know there was more than just the feeling of not really wanting to partake in violence. It was just kind of a spiritual thing. I just kind of questioned whether or not God wanted me to keep going and maybe this isn’t part of of a godly life. But I kind of came back around to, ‘No, this is definitely what God has called me to do.’"
Rose Namajunas retirement: 'Thug' spoke about how the entertainment side of MMA impacted her mindset
Rose Namajunas has weighed in on the entertainment aspect of the sport and how it contributed to her having doubts about continuing her career.
In the interview with Ariel Helwani, Namajunas shared that she looked at MMA as a source of education. But the fact there are people who watch the sport just for the violence and bloodshed bothered her mindset.
“At that moment, I was kind of questioning that, especially because it’s not so much the act of fighting itself, but just sometimes the entertainment side of it where people literally just pay money to watch violence. To me, that kind of bothered me. To me, it’s more of an educational thing and it’s an art, and it’s like all of those things combined. But I know that there’s a good portion of the population that literally watches only to see blood and violence, so that kind of weighs on me sometimes.”
Check out Rose Namajunas' comments from the 7:20 mark below: