By now you’ve been voraciously swept into the human knockout hurricane known as Holly Holm and her analytical pursuit to eventually arrive inside the UFC Octagon and fight Ronda Rousey. Let’s make this abundantly clear before we get into this superhuman-like being known as Holly Holm — if she fought Ronda Rousey this Summer she would get dominated. It won’t even be close, Rousey will close the distance at the start of the first round, pull off a slick uchi-mata and use it to transition to an arm bar. Fight over. Ronda Rousey reigns victorious and continues her frate traneage in MMA and picks up a lead role in the reboot of the Species franchise.
While Holy Holm has been sending women astral traveling in MMA since 2011 (12 years if you include her boxing career), the competition she’s faced inside the cage has been rather dull. It’s cliche to even state this, but Holly Holm really hasn’t been tested by high-caliber Invicta/UFC competition. Let’s face it, out of the seven opponents she’s fought in MMA, not one of them has a Wikipedia page. They’re ethereal punching bags for Holm to look extraordinary against, and she does in fact appear to be a whirling dervish of kicks and punches when she fights. However place a fighter like Joanne Calderwood opposite Holm and then we can start making proclamations as to how great the 32-year-old from Jackson’s MMA truly is.
Granted the same was echoed towards the end of Fedor’s MMA career after Pride FC collapsed under its own Yakuza weight. MMA fans claim (and still claim) that Fedor only looked impressive because of the competition he faced, and that if he fought guys like Shane Carwin, Junior dos Santos, and Brock Lesnar, he would have been eviscerated. Of course this notion reigned even more so after Fedor caught a submission loss to Werdum, TKO by Bigfoot, and a KO from Hendo — all in one long and depressing streak.
The fact that I even used Fedor to describe Holm should indicate that she has the force of a thousand supernovas in her fists — and that’s scary. The real question is will cooler heads prevail between Holm’s camp and the UFC. Is Dana White still going to hold on to that ego-driven business model that’s made getting in the UFC’s roster so exclusive, or will we witness another Fedor incident and watch a remarkable fighter be robbed of a shot inside the Octagon due to petty contractual disputes. Actually both of those scenarios are essentially the same, which means Holm could basically wave goodbye to her UFC aspirations. Well, I guess we’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, look at this gnarly KO Holly Holm put on Juliana Werner at Legacy FC 30 last night. Props to Zprophet for the .gif.
