In the wake of the UFC’s announcement that woman’s bantamweight champion Miesha Tate will fight Amanda Nunes at UFC 200 in July, Holly Holm’s manager Lenny Fresquez accused her of deliberately avoiding a rematch.
“Holly was offered to [Tate] and she chose Nunes,” Fresquez told The Albuquerque Journal. “She chose to take a weaker opponent.”
However, Tate has since denied that’s the case, and revealed that it was the UFC who pushed for her to fight Nunes instead.
“They were like, ‘Look, you just beat Holly. You finished her,'” Tate told MMAjunkie.com. “They didn’t feel that it was necessary to have an immediate rematch; it didn’t warrant an immediate rematch. It wasn’t one of those performances or such a crazy fight that we’ve got to have an immediate rematch.
“It was kind of like, ‘Let’s open up the division – we’d like you to fight Amanda.’”
Fresquez had also claimed that Tate hadn’t “returned the favor” after Holm granted her a shot at the title at UFC 196 rather than wait for a more lucrative rematch with Ronda Rousey.
Tate doesn’t see it that way though, and claims she has proof that Holm’s team were only looking out for her best interests at the time.
“I was told by the UFC that her management walked in there and told them that I was going to be a tuneup fight,” Tate said. “That is word-for-word what I was told.
“They didn’t do it as a favor to me. It’s not like they were, ‘You know, we really want to do this for Miesha, we’ll just give her a chance.’ No, they gave themselves a chance to have a big payday and remain the champion, and they thought I was going to be an easy fight, and it backfired.”
