All Lauren Murphy wanted was a few hours to recover.
Following a heartbreaking loss to Nicco Montano in the opening round of ‘The Ultimate Fighter’ tournament to determine the first ever UFC women’s flyweight champion, Murphy was 14 hours removed from the fight and she was still not mentally or physically ready to deal with anything including a trip to the gym for training.
So Murphy skipped the early morning practice to get some extra sleep, have a good cry and just center herself before returning to the gym that afternoon to rejoin her teammates on the mats.
“The next morning, I literally felt like I had been in a car accident,” Murphy told the Fight Society podcast. “I took the morning off. Most fighters will take a whole week off after they fight and obviously that’s not an option on “The Ultimate Fighter” but you can take a day off. It’s not going to hurt anything.”
Unfortunately, coach Eddie Alvarez was not happy that Murphy decided to skip out on the early practice while saying to the team that perhaps she wasn’t ‘built’ for this life if she couldn’t suck it up to be there for the other fighters the next day. In a subsequent interview, Alvarez called Murphy ‘selfish’ for her actions even though she only missed one practice and still showed up for the afternoon session on the same day.
Murphy had no idea what exactly Alvarez had said about her until the latest episode aired on Wednesday night and she was not happy to hear what came from her former coach on the show.
“For Eddie to say that I must not be built for this because I didn’t go into the gym the morning after I was on the wrong end of a fist fight, that’s just crazy to me,” Murphy said. “Ask Eddie if he went into the gym the morning after Conor McGregor knocked him out. I guarantee you he wasn’t skipping into the gym to help his teammates get ready for their next fights. Eddie went home with his family, he got to get on his little smartphone, order some good food and process what had happened. Whatever he needed to do to process that loss.
“On “The Ultimate Fighter”, we don’t have that. We can’t contact our families. We don’t have our normal comforts around us. We don’t even get to have a f–king phone. For him to expect everyone to be a robot and a machine and not feel anything when this is for the UFC belt. You’d think Eddie of all people would be more understanding how devastating that loss was.”
Following the early morning session when the other fighters returned to the house, Murphy wondered if Alvarez had said anything to them about her fight or her missing practice but they all kept quiet. When the show aired on Wednesday night, Murphy was incensed at some of the comments Alvarez made about her, especially considering she says that he actually thanked her later in the same day for not bringing a negative energy onto the mats when she wasn’t emotionally invested in training for the morning session.
“I had no idea that Eddie had done these interviews talking a bunch of s–t about me,” Murphy said. “I didn’t know. I knew he wasn’t happy about me not going into the gym, but none of the girls would tell me what he said. So the girls came back from their morning practice and I’m like ‘did Eddie talk a bunch of s–t about me?’ and they were kind of like ‘no, don’t worry about it, nothing’. Then I watched the episode and I’m like he’s saying a bunch of hurtful s–t.
“Knowing that had happened and then watching what he said on the episode, it just kind of blows my mind that somebody could be so two-faced in such a short amount of time.”
At this point, Murphy has no real desire to speak to Alvarez about the incident other than what she’s saying now publicly that he can listen to or read about.
Murphy says her opinion of Alvarez wasn’t all that high when the season finished filming and this altercation only compounds her feelings on the former UFC champion.
“My opinion of Eddie was not very high as it was and now it’s even lower. It’s below dirt,” Murphy said. “I can’t believe that he would say those things about somebody he was just speaking so highly of and especially to say it to the rest of the team.”
Listen to Murphy’s interview from the Fight Society podcast here or download and subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts
