Miesha Tate made no bones about just where she thought she was against Holly Holm in the fifth round of their fight and just what she needed to do to get the win.
The women’s bantamweight division has a new champion. Former Strikeforce champ Miesha Tate climbed the mountain of contenders once again to get a crack at the UFC title and pried the belt out of Holly Holm’s unconscious grasp. It wasn’t easy, by any stretch of the imagination. While she found great success in round 2, taking a 10-8 round on all three judges’ scorecards, she entered the fifth round having lost rounds 1, 3, and 4. Miesha Tate needed a finish to walk out of UFC 196 with a belt around her waist.
At the post fight press conference, she talked about her emotions going into that last round (transcript via MMA Fighting):
“Bryan came in there and basically told me you’ve gotta go guns blazing. He said risk it to get the biscuit, essentially. I knew that if I had to risk getting knocked out at that point, that’s what was going to happen.”
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“It feels like enough time, obviously,” Tate said of five minutes. “I made it happen. The thing bout me is that my mentality is it doesn’t matter to me how down I get at any point in the fight. I’ve been literally knocked down and almost out of it and I get back up and I win the fight. It doesn’t matter how many times you get knocked down, it’s how many times you get back up. I think that’s what a champion does.”
The big question now is, what comes next for Tate? The answer on the horizon seems to be Ronda Rousey, as she reportedly told Dana White that she’s “gotta get back to work” now that Tate is champion. It’s a fight the UFC seems happy to make, as Rousey has been the most transcendent fighter in the history of the promotion. No news yet as to exactly when that will be, but before Tate’s win, Rousey was talking about returning late this fall.