A few months ago, Miesha Tate was contemplating retirement. Passed by for a title shot, and seemingly in no man's land despite four straight wins in the UFC, Tate had no clear path toward gold. The whole career felt without purpose.
A short time later, the landscape of fighting changed. Holly Holm knocked out Tate's longtime nemesis Ronda Rousey, and then Rousey decided she needed time away from the fight game. Suddenly, Tate's number came up as Plan B. From purgatory to the biggest bout in women's fighting, Tate stepped in to face Holm at UFC 196.
With a Holm-Rousey rematch in the pipeline, it was a gamble for the ages, even for a company that was born through the gambling industry. And like most bets in Las Vegas, it came up a loser.
In a stunner, Tate came back from a late-round deficit to defeat Holm via rear-naked choke at 3:30 of the fifth round.
"I knew I had to finish the fight, find the perfect time," an emotional Tate told UFC announcer Joe Rogan after the win. "I had to be perfect in the fifth round. She edged me in a few of the previous rounds. I knew the fifth was important."
Tate won with a late burst that so often evades fighters who are obviously trailing but fail to mount a last challenge.
Midway through the round, she ducked under a Holm left hand and dragged her to the ground from behind. Tate hung on desperately, climbed Holm's back and sunk in her hooks. Holm managed to stand up with Tate on her back, but as she did, Tate sunk the choke. Holm flipped Tate over, but Tate never let go and sunk the choke deeper. Holm tried to hand-fight the hold, but there was no escaping. She didn't tap, instead falling unconscious as ref John McCarthy pulled Tate off, in the process declaring a new champion.
After falling short in two previous UFC title shots, Tate exploded in a euphoric celebration.
"I waited so long for you to say that, Joe," Tate said after Rogan announced her as the bantamweight champ.
Tate's win serves to set up a likely third bout between her and the former champion Rousey, who has been missing from the MMA scene since being knocked out by Holm last November.
Going into the fight, the Holm-Tate matchup was seen as an incredible risk.
Appearing on ESPN's Mike and Mike a month after Rousey was knocked out, UFC President Dana White was strongly in favor of immediately moving toward Holm-Rousey II, saying, "I think that if we didn't make the rematch, me and [UFC CEO] Lorenzo [Fertitta] should probably lose our promoters' license."
However, shortly afterward, that seemingly chiseled-in-stone plan blew up when Rousey decided to extend her time away from the cage to take a break from a hectic schedule that saw her fight three times and appear in two major movie junkets in a nine-month span.
Holm never wavered on staying active, though in a sense, her gamble to skip forward to Tate was hedged by appearing on a card with Conor McGregor, where as a champion, she is guaranteed a piece of a pay-per-view card that is likely to draw a huge audience.
Holm had her moments in the fight, clearly winning from distance with good use of angles and footwork. But there were immediate signs Holm would be in trouble when the fight went to the mat, as Tate took Holm down in the second round and dominated her from the top and side control with elbows and punches.
For a time, it seemed like it would be Tate's best and last opportunity, as Holm stopped a succession of takedown tries after that until the final one in the fifth.
“It wasn’t the right move to shake her off my back; it was stupid and I should have fought it off more," Holm said after the fight, in a quote released to the media by the UFC public relations team. "When you are up against a wrestler like that, of course that threat is there for a takedown and you have to recognize it.”
On the bright side for Holm, she can still count on an eventual payday against Rousey, though the loss takes a bit of a luster off of it.
But that is for another day and another time. For now, Tate gets the spotlight.
She gets to ask for Rousey, to ask for the monster payday, and to be the center of the UFC women's fighting universe. Just months after pondering walking away, her career reached its apex point. Not a moment too late, not a moment too soon.
