Miesha Tate recently lost to Lauren Murphy at UFC Long Island.
Miesha Tate had a rough night at the office a few weeks ago at UFC on ABC 3. In Long Island she was thoroughly beaten by Lauren Murphy, losing a unanimous decision and suffering a great deal of damage in the process.
The loss, which was also her flyweight debut, was the second defeat in a row for the former bantamweight champion. Prior to her bruising encounter with Murphy, she also lost a lopsided decision to Ketlen Vieira.
Those fights followed her triumphant comeback fight, a TKO win over Marion Reneau, in July, 2021. The fight with Reneau came four years after Tate had announced her retirement from the sport.
Despite taking hard back-to-back losses, ‘Cupcake’ says she isn’t considering going back into retirement.
She spoke about this decision on her Sirius XM Radio show.
“I’m at a very great point in my life,” she said (ht MMA Junkie). “Not like Chapter One. Chapter One was kind of toxic and a lot of turmoil and (fighting) was like my outlet and my identity. It’s none of those things for me anymore, so as I continue to evolve – and life is great. It’s very cush and I have everything that I need. I don’t need to fight. I just want to. I want to do better than I did this time, so I’m not going to give up. But this is a whole new challenge. I just need to get my mindset a little bit more gritty, a little bit more right, a little bit more – ‘I’ve got to have it.’ Not just there to have fun. Like, ‘I’ve got to have it.’ I just don’t feel like I hit the nail on the head with that this time.”
Tate added that she wants to enlist some professional help in order to adjust her mindset before heading into the Octagon again.
“As soon as I get a good sports physiologist and start to unravel or figure out how to channel, I think I’ll have more idea. I don’t know how long it takes. It might be a really simple fix. The performance, my physical ability, the shape that I’m in, the way I train, the skillset that I have, is all there. I just have to put it in the right place at the right time.
“I definitely need to take some time to figure it out. It was a really long camp, it got draw out two times. I don’t know if I’m going to stay at 125 or just go back to 135 where I can enjoy. The diet, for that long, made me want to blow my brains out. It was terrible. I think I might stay at 135. I don’t know. We’ll see. I need a little time to regroup and see where I go from it.”
The 35-year-old Tate is an MMA pioneer and one of the first women to gain notoriety in the sport. She began fighting in 2007 (at a one-night tournament in Indiana hosted by HOOKnSHOOT).
In 2011 she submitted Marloes Coenen to win the Strikeforce bantamweight title. She lost that belt to Ronda Rousey a year later.
She was signed to the UFC when the promotion decided to finally admit women. She lost her first two contests in the Octagon, to Cat Zingano and Rousey (for the UFC bantamweight title).
Tate then won four straight fights to set up a title fight with Holly Holm in 2016. Tate beat home by submission to win the belt. She lost the belt, in her first defence, to Amanda Nunes. She then lost to Raquel Pennington, which prompted her first retirement from the sport.