Ronda Rousey announce today on Good Morning America that her next fight will come against Holly Holm at UFC 195 in Las Vegas on January 2nd of next year.
At this stage there’s no word on why Rousey won’t be fighting Miesha Tate for a third time as was originally planned, but Rousey seems happy enough with her new opponent.
“[Holm is] the most decorated striker we have in all of mixed martial arts,” Rousey stated on GMA. “Definitely my biggest challenge to date. I’m super excited about it.”
“She’s not the average chick I would fight. She’s the best striker I’ve ever fought and striking is something I learned much later in my career.”
Holm is an 18-time world boxing champion with a 33-2-3 career record, has a background in kickboxing and made a successful switch to MMA over the past few years, so far compiling a 9-0 record including two wins inside the Octagon to date.
It’s an impressive resume and she’s long been targeted as a potential opponent for Rousey, but despite her success in the cage so far she only ranked No.9 in the bantamweight division at this moment in time and it had generally been anticipated that she’d get at least another fight or two under her belt before fighting the sport’s current biggest star.
On the surface this is a more marketable fight for Rousey since she’d already convincingly beaten Tate twice before and Holm’s boxing background is going to make it easy to hype this as a competitive match-up to the casual fan.
However, at this stage there’s not a whole lot from her UFC appearances so far to suggest that Holm is the woman to dethrone Rousey and her boxing and kickboxing experience isn’t going to be any use against the champions world class judo and submission skills.
Still, nobody thought Bethe Corriea had a hope in hell against Rousey either and yet UFC 190 was the promotion’s biggest PPV so far this year and is estimated to have done around one million pay-per-view buys, so there’s no reason to believe this latest match-up will be anything other than a major success for the UFC.
