Sometimes the answer is staring you right in the face. Dana White spoke to the Los Angeles Times recently about the freshly announced fight booking between Ronda Rousey and Holly Holm and had a pretty plain and simple answer as to why the UFC suddenly decided to go with the former boxing champion over the former Strikeforce champion who has twice been on the losing end against Rousey already.
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The answer, everyone’s already seen the Tate fight:
“We were talking about Miesha from the start, then as we started sitting around we were saying, ‘Everyone has seen the Miesha fight already,'”
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“A third fight in a rivalry usually comes after the stuff we’d see in [Arturo] Gatti-[Micky] Ward. With Miesha, the result has been the same twice. Everyone’s already seen that fight.”
As to what Dana White thinks Holm has to offer:
“Everyone has jitters in their first fight. Holly came back from that and destroyed a woman who’d looked damn good in her previous fights.”
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“When you talk about the possibilities of what Holly can do … she’s a world-class boxer … the Holly Holm fight for Ronda is way more intriguing.”
Whether you believe that Holm isn’t ready for the challenge of facing Rousey yet or you really do think she might have a chance, there really isn’t a lot of point in putting together Rousey vs. Tate 3. It’s not a fight fans are clamoring for and regardless of the rounds survived it would be something of an overstatement to say that Tate has been competitive with Rousey to this point in her career.
According to White, the UFC is now looking to book Tate in a fight against Amanda Nunes. For her part, Brett Okamoto reports that Holm had agreed to a bout with Sarah Kaufman. No word yet as to who the UFC will have lined up to face Kaufman now that Holm is fighting for the title.
UFC 195 is expected to take place on January 2nd in Las Vegas, Nevada and will be headlined by Ronda Rousey vs. Holly Holm. Strawweight champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk has been tabbed for the co-main event where she’ll take on Claudia Gadelha in a rematch of their 2014 bout.
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