An injury has KO’ed one Cat fight for UFC bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey, but it has also created another type of cat fight.
In fact, the matchup between Rousey and Miesha Tate will probably be more appealing than what was supposed to be a bout between Rousey and Cat Zingano.
Zingano, who beat Tate via technical knockout in their match in April to determine who would go on to face Rousey, suffered a right knee injury in training and is out indefinitely following surgery.
Zingano hasn’t lost in eight fights and facing Rousey, who hasn’t lost in seven, would have been the Battle of the Unbeaten. But the bout between Rousey and Tate is the rematch of the Battle of the Beauties.
That’s how the now-defunct Strikeforce featured the historic fight between the two in March 2012. Rousey dropped down from featherweight to bantamweight to challenge Tate without following the traditional path to the top.
Strikeforce took a bold step by allowing it to happen, much to the dismay and disappointment of Tate and other fighters who felt Rousey hadn’t paid her dues. Rousey systematically and psychologically tried to break down Tate through the media, and Strikeforce capitalized on it, combined with the fighters’ good looks.
Rousey beat Tate at 4:27 of the first round with her patented armbar submission to win the belt and has since gone on to become arguably the UFC’s hottest property. The UFC created a title belt just for her before Strikeforce had officially died and started marketing her with vigour.
When the UFC made the bold move to feature Rousey in the main event of UFC 157, it banked on fight fans literally buying women’s MMA. The event drew positive pay-per-view ratings and created mainstream publicity that may have been far more important in terms of expanding the company’s reach beyond its core audience.
The fact Rousey had to work harder than ever in her career to stave off an attempt by opponent Liz Carmouche to beat her with a rear-naked choke/neck crank and ultimately won via her patented armbar submission showed her resilience when facing adversity.
Deciding to pit two women as opposing coaches in TUF 18 and opening it up to men and women added a new element to the series, which in many ways help invigorate the company when it was collapsing under the weight of a heavy debt.
Zingano’s injury, while a blow to the fighter, is actually a blessing for the UFC. Any rematch has a built-in storyline between the fighters and the possibility the second match will turn out differently than the first — notwithstanding what just happened between heavyweight champion Cain Velasquez, who defended his belt against Antonio Silva with an easy beatdown.
You have to think that Rousey will be more than willing to go back into the past to browbeat Tate, who surely will have learned from all that happened to her the first time, both in terms of handling her opponent’s mind games and fending off the armbar.
Of course, it is one thing to become stronger mentally, but Tate will have a much harder time defending Rousey’s signature submission move.
This can all play out rather well for the TUF series. Strikeforce did a great job building up the feud between Rousey and Tate, but the UFC, with all of its financial resources and assets, can take this to a higher level.
Rousey has already compared her feud with Tate as being similar to the one between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, which is really stretching things but that kind of talk, combined with her ability to back up her bravado in the cage, has made her so marketable.
There are some interesting sidebars to all of this. Tate’s boyfriend is controversial UFC bantamweight fighter Bryan Caraway. He took to Twitter to make some remarks about Rousey leading up to her fight against Tate, calling her an “unintelligent bimbo” and followed it up by tweeting “if she wants to challenge a man, I’ll knock her teeth dwn her throat the break her arm!”
When the spectre was raised on Twitter about Caraway’s politically incorrect comments, particularly as it applied to endorsing men beating up women, he replied by saying: “Oh I dnt hit Women! But she not a women. She gonna act like a dude she can deal w the consequences.”
Caraway has become even more of a polarizing figure. He was awarded the $65,000 Submission of the Night bonus following his victory over Johnny Bedford a month ago at UFC 159 when the original winner, Pat Healy, had the award taken away for testing positive for marijuana metabolites following his fight against Jim Miller.
Clearly ecstatic about the bonus, Healy told MMAJunkie: “All I’ve got to say is that’s some expensive weed. I like Healy a lot. I came up through the fighting ranks with him. We used to train together at Team Quest. I love the guy. But I have absolutely zero remorse. I hate weed. I cannot stand it. I’ve never tried it. I’ve never smoked a drug in my life.
“So I have absolutely zero tolerance for people that do it. I don’t care if it’s legal in some places or not. I think it’s absolutely ridiculous. Whether it’s legal in real life or not, they tell you to follow the rules. You need to follow the rules.”
That prompted a swift reaction from UFC lightweight Nate Diaz, who used a gay slur in a Twitter comment to verbally attack Caraway for his remarks. “I feel bad for Pat Healy that they took a innocent mans money and I think the guy who took the money is the biggest f-g in the world.”
Diaz was fined $20,000 and suspended 90 days by the UFC for the remarks.
Rousey has trained at the same gym in Los Angeles as Diaz and his brother, Nick. So not only do you have heat between Rousey and Tate, you also have some underlying discord between people close to both of them.
Could Caraway and Diaz somehow appear as guest coaches during the filming of TUF 18? Would they be included on the unannounced card in which the Rousey/Tate rematch happens (albeit not in the same bout because they fight in different divisions)?
Think of the possibilities. It’s very interesting.
To borrow a line from Kramer in Seinfield, “Catfight? Yeye Catfight.”