“See what had happened was…”
After the kick heard round the world landed by bantamweight champion Holly Holm on then champ Ronda Rousey, the Tarverdyan camp came under much scrutiny. One for the corner advice and another for the holes exploited in her game. In case you missed it Tarverdyan was heard telling Ronda she was doing just fine after being flogged in the first round. Though Ronda’s striking skills have been looking much better from her strike force days, when she went up against a pro like Holm, she looked like an ameature. Mindlessly pressing forward, with the footwork of the Lock ness monster, and almost zero head movement, Ronda looked like a fish out of water – at one point whiffing a shot so bad she feel to her knees and looked up in bewilderment. After Joe Rogan and many other media members called for firing of Tarverdyan, the striking coach has finally broken his silence and spoken on the loss to ESPN.
“It was the biggest loss of my career. You know you won’t ever want that to happen again. So what that means is, I’ve got to work harder. Every little thing I’ve got to be honest with and make sure that we’re ready to go. Yeah there was a lot of criticism afterwards about adding a boxing coach. MMA is not a boxing game, but Ronda got caught, and we will be taking advice from boxing trainers. We’re not going to sit here and change everything that we’ve done, we’ve done stuff that I think is working, it’s been great. We’re not going to have something so much different for Ronda. Have we been doing everything wrong? No, that’s not the situation. It’s a fight, Ronda got caught with a shot, and it was a little bit of a roller coaster from there.”
As far as a rematch, Tarverdyan says it will happen, but when? Probably not until 2017…
“Ronda did three fights last year. I think she deserves time off. That’s what [UFC president] Dana [White] said, too. So we’ve spoke about that. You know Dana judges things very fairly, and he completely understood. If you watch her career, she was fighting back-to-back. Even her amateur fights, she took a lot of fights back-to-back. Of course, she got [quick] finishes, but it’s not only about the ring time, it’s about the training. She’s trained very hard to give it 100 percent every day, so you know, that’s hard for the body. Ronda has been through a lot. She’s had knee surgeries … and we don’t want to end up with the same thing, having another knee surgery, so we need to relax a little bit, take our time and get her in better shape slowly and mentally and physically.”
Hear it all in Edmond Tarverdyan‘s words in the video below: https://youtu.be/xZZZHbdRCdY What do you think about Edmond Tarverdyan’s response? Is it just an excuse or did Ronda “just get caught”? Let us know in the comments section and follow us on social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter Lionel Harris-Spence is an MMA purist, budding film maker, and writer for Generation Iron.
