Chris Beal’s TUF 18 Fighter Blog Week 4: You Know What I Learned From a Loss? Losing Sucks!

The last couple weeks of The Ultimate Fighter have been pretty tough for me.

As you know, I lost my fight to Chris Holdsworth on last week’s show. There’s no way around it. It sucks.

That’s the first time I’ve ever lost in my career. Did I learn from it? I sure did. I learned that losing sucks, plain and simple. It sucks, and I don’t ever want to go through that again.

Maybe the only thing that sucks worse is that I had to relive it when it finally aired on Fox Sports 1. That’s probably why I didn’t sit down with a big group of friends or anyone to watch it. It still stings.

I’m back in the gym now, working on the things I need to do to make sure it never happens again.

Moving on from my disappointment, we finally got the victory we needed to take control.

That was awesome, but it was also a bittersweet moment for pretty much everyone in the house, because it happened when my teammate Jessica Rakoczy took out Roxanne Modafferi.

Now, they put Jessica on display like she was the mother figure of the house… and she was. She’s really cool people.

I was really close with Jessica, and that’s probably because she was that mom-type for me. I’ll be honest, I can’t cook a microwave dinner. So she would cook for me a lot of times, while I took bag duty, lugging everyone’s stuff around.

But Foxy Roxy – that’s what I called Roxanne – is such a sweetheart. Everybody was always on their best behavior around her. No cussing, nothing. She is genuinely just the nicest person you ever met.

When it came time for the fight though, despite Roxy having way more experience in MMA than Jessica, it went down mostly how I expected.

You have to remember, Jessica doesn’t have a lot of MMA experience, but she’s a world champion boxer with like 30 or 40 boxing matches. I’m known for good hand speed, and I thought I’d have the fastest hand speed in the house, but Jessica is unreal. I’ve been hit by her and thought she’d knock somebody out.

I just didn’t think it’d be by a slam.

It was crazy watching the fight on TV because watching it live, I knew Jessica hurt Roxy with the slam, but it didn’t seem as bad as it looked on TV.

But you know, the referee did a good job not stopping at that point. You have to understand, this is the biggest opportunity in our lives for most of us and you need to give us every opportunity, within reason, to try and fight out of a bad situation.

I was happy for Jess and for our team, but man, I don’t think anybody took any joy in Roxy losing. That was kind of tough for everybody.

It’ll be interesting to see how things are shown next week when Coach Ronda’s mom is there. She was a world Judo champion and she had some really great stories. It’s easy to see where Coach Ronda got the confidence to become a UFC champion.

Team Rousey’s Chris Beal is blogging exclusively for MMAWeekly.com readers throughout the Team Rousey vs. Team Tate season. You can follow him on Twitter @RealDealCbeal.