‘It was fate’: revisiting Holly Holm’s unfathomable defeat of Ronda Rousey, 10 years later

There was a moment, very late in the first round of Holly Holm’s colossal victory over Ronda Rousey on November 14, 2015, when the denial of what was happening in Melbourne became clear. As Rousey ate another left hand and bled a nose in a fight she was clearly losing, play-by-play man Mike Goldberg trotted out a fanciful line, as if he was unable to sense the danger of the terrain.

“It takes a lot of energy to be a rock star” said.

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Joe Rogan, who 10 years ago was still attending UFC PPV events held on foreign soil, calmed down very quickly.

“Well, they’re punching him in the face,” he said. “It has nothing to do with being a rock star. “She is lighting up.”

Goldberg’s line at that moment at UFC 193 seems more ridiculous than ever a decade later, uttered just as one of the sport’s biggest stars was facing his first terrible adversity. It was like the band that kept playing while the Titanic was sinking, joyful until the end. However, it illustrated how deeply intoxicated the crowd was with Rousey and her glow of invincibility.

Goldberg was not alone. Many people at the scene denied it and reported that night from Australia.

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Ten years later, it’s still difficult to describe Holm’s loss to Rousey in a way that conveys the magnitude of the feat. For anyone who has gotten into MMA in recent years, there is nothing equivalent to what she meant to the sport at that time. It wasn’t Matt Serra who surprised Georges St-Pierre, who was always the biggest surprise of all time in MMA. He was closer to Buster Douglas’ dethroning of Mike Tyson in Tokyo, which bordered on the impossible.

To this day, to appreciate it is to remember how it felt when Rousey rushed to take him down early in the second round, desperate to turn things around, and ended up crashing into the fence with a knee. His fall became apparent to everyone at the same time and was one of the most impactful shared experiences we have had in sport.

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And context was everything.

Remember how deeply embedded Rousey was in pop culture. She had first announced the fight on “Good Morning America.” Although Holm was the former boxing champion, a member of the Sweet Science Hall of Fame before donning four-ounce gloves, it was Rousey who appeared on the cover of the so-called “Bible of Boxing,” The Ring magazine. Rousey was the one who appeared in the lyrics, becoming a rallying cry at concerts and thriving as a symbol of female empowerment. In fact, it was Rousey who helped Holm rise in MMA, as Rousey’s star power opened doors for women in the UFC. Watching it destroyed was like watching Holm set fire to the same Trojan horse he arrived on.

Then there were the more obvious details. Rousey, fighting for the third time in nine months, went 6-0 in the UFC, making six defenses of the bantamweight title. Four came via armbar and two, including her previous fight against Bethe Correia, by knockout. Their previous three fights lasted a total of one minute and four seconds, which is why Rogan said his exit reminded him of Tyson. As a 12-1 betting favorite, she was there to defeat a warm body. The suspense of a Rousey fight was not Yeahbut how long.

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Then everything happened. He refused to touch the gloves, which were marked. Then the left hands started shooting. The marks on the face and the blood. The panic in her eyes as she realized she was being surpassed. Then the oblique kicks, the elbows to the temple, the crumbling walls around his world.

So boom…

The head kick that ended one of the most famous UFC stories.

“I’ll tell you what,” Holm tells Uncrowned, thinking about it all a decade later. “When I was in high school, my dad and I were having a very meaningful conversation. We were both crying. There was a lot going on in life, and he looked me right in the eyes and simply said: “I think you’re going to do something in this world that will impact people..‘ He said: “I don’t know, I just feel like it’s destiny: you’re going to do something that will be known.” I had only said that once or twice before, that it was destiny.”

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Maybe it was that night at the Etihad Stadium.

At the weigh-in the day before, Rousey appeared to a thunderous ovation from the Melbourne crowd and faced off against Holm. Holm was unwavering. In fact, she was like a statue, hardened to all forms of intimidation. She brought her left hand out and dragged it along Rousey’s chin as they separated, as if foreshadowing what was to come. Rousey seemed nervous, which to some was a red flag. Strong emotions can be counterproductive in the fighting game. The great photographer Esther Lin took a photo of that exchange that looked like a Renaissance painting, with strands of blonde hair and bald spectators, behind a glow that illuminated the actions like the lighting itself.

Holm, who at the time had only had two fights in the UFC, had been there before. She had been in a similar situation 10 years earlier in the boxing ring against Christy Martin, the first female boxer to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. When she shocked the world that time, the world had no idea that it should be shocked.

“That was a big boxing fight and I was a big loser,” she says. “And my dad told me, ‘I think it’s destiny. Just go out and do it.’ And then my fight with Ronda, when it came up, a lot of people, because it was only my third fight in the UFC, they said, what’s the rush? ‘You can say no,’ they said, ‘you can wait.'”

There was no wait. The old proverb says, “jump and the net will appear,” and that’s what Holm did. She jumped.

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“I said, ‘If I’m not ready now, I’ll never be ready.’ When I told people I was going to fight Ronda, they were like, ‘Oh, are you excited?’ They didn’t know how to feel about it. I also called my dad. I told him, ‘Dad, I know who my next fight will be.’ And he says, ‘Oh yeah, tell me her name, I’ll look for her.’ I was like, ‘No, it’s Ronda.’ And he says, ‘Destiny, darling.’ Not even like, ‘Are you sure?’ He simply said: ‘Destination.’

In 2015 there were images of everyone in Albuquerque watching in a bar, exploding when the fateful head kick landed. Twitter, which was more of a community than a cesspool, was flooded with expressions of disbelief. The ESPN ticker exploded. We had understood what we had just witnessed together in real time, and amazement was the common denominator.

Rousey was 28 years old at the time and her horizons were so broad that they could cover the entire Pacific she had crossed to be there. Holm was 34 years old, he was green in MMA, but he was a professional of the highest level and a boxing champion. He had an experienced left hand and knew how to use his reach in kickboxing. His takedown defense was also solid, although perhaps unrecognized at the time. In retrospect, the dangers he brought to the table far outweighed his relative inexperience in cage fighting.

“It was one of those things, and no one caught it on video, but if you watch that fight, they saw me hugging my dad right after,” he says. “But they didn’t catch this part, which I’m glad they didn’t; it was our moment. But when my dad walked through the cage door, he says, ‘Destiny, baby.’ And I said, ‘Yes.'”

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The image of Holm taking an emotional lap around the octagon while Rousey lay on the canvas lives on. What he had just accomplished was registering for her just as it was for everyone else.

“It’s one of those moments,” he says. “I know it’s the main thing people remember, and it’s the main thing people talk about. I don’t mind talking about it. I mean, it was a great moment in my life and in my career. I know it’s not the only part of my career. I’m proud of what I’ve done in my life and I’m proud that I was able to have moments in boxing that were huge. Maybe it’s not as globally known, because the world of women’s boxing wasn’t that big when I did it, but I also had some shocking moments in boxing.”

Although revisionists might claim to have predicted the events that took place on November 14, 2015, no one saw Rousey, the 12-1 favorite, fall the way she did. Except maybe Holm and her father, who knew perhaps better than anyone what “The Preacher’s Daughter” was capable of.

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Now, 10 years on forever, Holm’s defeat of Rousey still ranks among the most shocking events to ever happen in the UFC.

“I know it’s not the only defining moment of my whole legacy and everything,” Holm says. “It’s one of those moments that sticks in people’s heads, and that’s okay.”