Michael Bisping did everything in his power to keep this week’s The Ultimate Fighter 34 fight from being canceled; unfortunately for his team, his efforts ended up working in Daniel Cormier’s favor.
Team Cormier took the lead at 3-2 on the season with Brazilian strawweight Tina Black winning a grudge match against countrywoman Natalia Alves. The former Invicta FC champion out-struck Alves and foiled her attempts to take her to the ground, then capped off her performance with a knockout flurry late in Round 2.
Watch the finish below.
There was plenty of drama leading up to the fight, including Bisping tricking Black’s coach outside of the show, UFC Hall of Famer Urijah Faber, into believing that Black was on his team so that he would reveal the Team Cormier fighter’s weaknesses.
With knowledge of Black’s supposed limitations in hand, Alves was to utilize her wrestling to dominate the fight, but it didn’t go according to plan and her teammate, TUF 34 guest blogger Xavier Franklin explained what went wrong.
Xavier: Tina is a backfoot fighter. She’s a sniper. She can fight moving any way. Backwards forwards, it’s very hard to get somebody, a fighter that can fight backwards. So it’s also very hard to wrestle somebody that’s moving backwards. You have to have somebody going forward in order to catch them in the takedowns. I feel like our game plan was to wrestle, but you can wrestle if you can get to the wrestling. If you can’t get to the target, you’re not going to be able to employ your strength.
Natalia, she wasn’t getting up on Tina. She wasn’t cutting her off, but she was following her. You gotta cut her off. One thing about people that move a lot is they have to maintain that the whole time. So if you force them to move even more, just a little bit with a little bit more pressure, they’re gonna get tired a little bit. And then when Tina was throwing, Natalia should have been throwing with her, like she was already getting hit and countered, so you might as well just throw at the same time she’s throwing. … Tina was going straight and Natalia was trying to go around, so that’s how she got hurt. She went to open up and throw something and she got caught with basically a straight left jab when I think she should have just went straight, like an overhand or something I think would have helped more. But yeah, that weight cut was brutal.
Alves’ difficult weight cut shaped the narrative of Episode 5, as she was attempting to cut all the way up to the last second, even receiving an extra hour to make the weight. Coach Bisping was with her every step of the way, even if he would rather have been anywhere else.
Xavier: Bisping was literally in the sauna with her. She tried to get out. He trapped her in there. She was screaming and all this shit. He said, ‘We’re not leaving until you get this weight.’ He was being crazy. I’ll tell you, Bisping is super hands on. He’s a winner. I could tell he was passionate about it. He was in the sauna with her and he hates the sauna.
Gigi [Canuto] was in the sauna with them and she was like, ‘He was in there tripping, talking to himself and shit.’ She was like, ‘I think he’s having flashbacks or something.’
Unfortunately for Bisping and Alves, the strawweight still failed to make the 115-pound limit, coming in at 116.5 pounds. This created a conundrum: Black could simply choose not to accept the fight, giving her a bye into the TUF 34 semifinals. However, for the sake of the show, Cormier and Bisping negotiated a deal in which Cormier would take care of his fighter by paying her $1,000 to fight (Black told MMA Fighting’s Guilherme Cruz she actually received $2,000), and Bisping would also have to shave his head.
That sacrifice went a long way towards motivating his team.
Xavier: I was like, ‘Wow, maybe you are here for us.’
Maybe it’s TV, but maybe not, because talking to him, he knows how to turn it on. He’s like ‘DC,’ they know how to turn it on when the camera is on. They know how to turn it on, but also like Bisping, you could tell he wears his heart on his sleeve. That was genuine. I couldn’t even believe it. I was like, wow, he actually cut his hair just so she could fight.
She could have been out of the tournament. Tina could have just been like, ‘No, I don’t want to fight her.’ Bisping actually cut his hair, so I was just like, ‘Shit.’ So then that kind of lit a fire under everybody. Shit, if he wants us to win this bad, we need to want to win as well. So yeah, that was cool, that was honestly pretty cool of him.
According to Xavier, the dramatic sequence of events likely could have been avoided if Alves was more disciplined with her diet in the TUF house.
Xavier: The time when we were getting ready for our fight, she was snacking so much. She doesn’t eat a lot, but she snacks like crazy, and me and Marlon [Jones] were like, ‘I don’t know if she’s going to make weight. She’s eating like crazy.’ We were asking, ‘Are you going to make weight?’ She’s like, ‘I’ll make weight,’ and I’m, like, ‘OK.’ Ilimbek [Akylbek Uulu] was like, ‘I don’t know if she’s going to make weight.’
He doesn’t even really talk. He’s just like, ‘She eats all the time, how she make weight? I don’t understand.’ … Every time somebody had some food or some snack, she would walk by and be like, ‘Let me see it’s good.’ She was eating a f*ck-ton, and I was like, ‘Oh my God, bro,’ like this is so bad.
She claimed she was going to make it. She didn’t, obviously, but we knew, damn, yeah, that was a bad idea.
While Xavier sympathized with Alves’ mistake, he’s had to deal with opponents missing weight in his own career and there were no former UFC champions around to help make things right.
Xavier: I’ve had it so many times. I fought in Vegas and the dude popped for steroids.
First, we were supposed to fight at 135. I was supposed to fight somebody different. That dude didn’t want to fight. Claimed he had an injury. So I was like, f*ck it, I’ll fight somebody else, I’ll do a catchweight at 140. We did the catchweight, he missed the catchweight, didn’t even try to cut the extra weight, and then he popped for steroids.
And then on top of that, the original dude I was supposed to fight was there, helping some fighter get ready. I was like, ‘That motherf*cker’s not hurt.’ It was just a bunch of bullshit. I’ve had so many people miss weight. My coach, he hates catchweights and all this shit. He’s like, ‘It’s all bullshit. If they’re gonna miss weight, like there’s no point in doing the catchweight.’
Next week’s episode features another grudge match as Team Cormier’s Sean Mora fights Team Bisping’s Ilimbek Akylbek Uulu in a bantamweight quarterfinal bout.
The Ultimate Fighter 34 streams exclusively on Paramount+ with new episodes every Tuesday.
Unlike most editions of TUF, coaches Michael Bisping and Daniel Cormier will not fight at the conclusion of the season, as both are long retired.
The finalists of the TUF 34 bantamweight and strawweight tournaments will compete for a six-figure UFC contract in the show’s live finale fights. A date for those bouts is yet to be announced.
See The Ultimate Fighter 34 teams below.
Team Bisping
Bantamweights
- Xavier Franklin (6-1-1, 1 NC), U.S.
- Mehemmedeli Osmanli (11-1), Azerbaijan
- Ilimbek Akylbek Uulu (9-3), Kyrgyzstan
- Marlon Jones (5-0), U.K.
Strawweights
- Anna Melisano (6-1), U.S.
- GiGi Canuto (7-1), Brazil
- Mackenzie Stiller (6-1), U.S.
- Natalia Alves (8-0), Brazil
Team Cormier
Bantamweights
- Artem Belakh (11-2), Kazakhstan
- Micaias Urena (12-4), Dominican Republic
- Sean Mora (7-1), Cuba
- Christian Strong (9-1), U.S.
Strawweights
- Tina Black (15-4, 1 NC), Brazil
- Delphine Benouaich (7-2), France
- Melissa Amaya (8-0), U.S.
- Anita Karim (6-2), Pakistan
Here are the quarterfinal results so far:
Melissa Amaya def. Anna Melisano via submission (rear-naked choke) (R1)
Christian Strong def. Marlon Jones via decision
GiGi Canuto def. Anita Karim via TKO (strikes) (R1)
Mehemmedeli Osmanli def. Artem Belakh via submission (rear-naked choke) (R1)
Tina Black def. Natalia Alves via TKO (strikes) (R2)
Advancing to semifinals: Amaya, Strong, Canuto, Osmani, Black
Eliminated: Melisano, Jones, Karim, Belakh, Alves
Xavier Franklin is a cast member on The Ultimate Fighter 34 and a guest contributor to MMA Fighting. He also served as Michael Bisping’s unofficial English accent translator on the show.
