Joanna Jedrzejczyk can be a very frightening specimen. Not only did she dismantle The Ultimate Fighter 20 winner and former strawweight champion Carla Esparza in never-seen-before fashion at UFC 185, she made her crumble long before the fight even started, broke her mentally with a sort of stone-cold demeanor, only few fighters possess.
There may be lots of fighters that trash talk their way up the rankings, who use a gimmick to promote their fights. Joanna “Champion” isn’t one of them.
“I don’t like trash talk, I hate it,” she explained in the latest issue of German MMA magazine Groundandpound.de. “But I’m training so hard, it’s my life, it’s part of me. So it’s natural, I’m not fake and I don’t have two faces. It’s me, Joanna, and they cannot copy me. I am original, that’s why I’m here.”
As a competitor, you have to have an inherent ferocity, that fighter’s mentality, to switch from being a nice guy to being a killer within a split second. Jedrzejczyk has that aggressiveness in her DNA.
“Even when I watched the fight, I couldn’t believe it was me”, Jedrzejczyk wondered, reminiscing of her brutal and one-sided title win against Esparza. “I’m like a beast, but outside the Octagon I’m a different person.”
This Saturday, Jedrzejczyk will defend her newly won belt for the first time against former Invicta FC champion and TUF 20 cast member Jessica Penne at UFC Berlin. Over the last couple of days, both fighters got themselves into sort of a verbal battle, after Penne initially stated that she will submit Jedrzejczyk in Germany’s capital.
Penne is indeed a very dangerous BJJ blackbelt, with seven out of twelve wins by way of submission. The champion, however, feels that Penne has just never faced an opponent with her qualities.
“She didn’t have a good striker as an opponent. I know how to strike, she doesn’t”, Jedrzejczyk laughed. “But if she wants to play with me on the ground, first of all she must take me down — and that isn’t easy.”
“But of course I have respect for her, she’s a very good fighter. It’s gonna be a pretty tough fight for both of us. But I always try to throw all my cards in the Octagon. We will play my game.”
With Esparza, Jedrzejczyk has beaten the winner of the first women-only The Ultimate Fighter season. Penne on the other hand, has managed to make it to the semifinals. A win over her, would make the outspoken Polish Muay Thai specialist 2-0 over TUF alumni.
“Sometimes the promoters and matchmakers, they don’t know about girls for example from Poland”, she says. “I’m happy that I didn’t get to the house, so I could show that me and the other girls, who were not in the house, that we are better than those girls.”
Joanna Jedrzejczyk will defend her UFC strawweight title against Jessica Penne this Saturday at UFC Fight Night Berlin.