It says something that the biggest women’s fight the UFC has put on in some time — arguably ever — pits a 36-year-old coming off her fourth surgery in as many years against a 38-year-old who retired over three years ago.
Such is the state of women’s MMA, once the domain of big names, big fights, and big beef between some of a nascent sport’s pioneers, which has since hit a lull after the current generation’s talent pool accepted the relay baton and struggled to maintain the blistering pace set by the athletes preceding them.
From a class that includes Ronda Rousey, Miesha Tate, Gina Carano, Cris Cyborg, and Holly Holm, the former two division champion Amanda Nunes and uber-decorated Kayla Harrison — who meet for UFC’s bantamweight title Saturday at UFC 334 in New York — are the last to graduate and perhaps already would have if their original booking in January wasn’t scrapped.
Harrison trained through immense discomfort ahead of that original fight at UFC 324, and nearly made it to the octagon, yet was forced to pull out two weeks shy of her first title defence when worsening symptoms — including but not limited to extreme arm weakness and severe nerve pain — forced her under the knife for a two-level spinal fusion that joined two of five herniated disks to stabilize vertebrae and relieve discomfort.
In other divisions, similar circumstances would have produced an interim title fight at least or a vacating of Harrison’s bantamweight championship at worst. But there’s no one even approaching the profile of these two women in the division — or any women’s division, for that matter — so the fight was put on ice for 10 months as the gap between women’s 135-pound. title fights stretched to nearly a year and a half.
After Nunes won her first bantamweight title submitting Tate all the way back at UFC 200 — Barack Obama was president and Peyton Manning was QB of the reigning Super Bowl champion Denver Broncos — she defended it five times while simultaneously winning the featherweight belt and defending that twice over the next half-decade. She headlined numbered events — including one with Rousey that did over a million pay-per-view buys — while earning reported half-million-dollar payouts.
It was a different time. In the world, in UFC, in women’s MMA. It’s hard to fathom any woman on today’s roster doing those kinds of numbers. That is, anyone shy of these two.
Returning from a three-year retirement, Nunes is hunting her third bantamweight title, while Harrison, who entered the UFC after dominating multiple PFL divisions over a rapid, five-year, 16-fight run, is seeking her first defence. Those legacy stakes alone make this the most marquee women’s fight in years, to say nothing of how uncommonly talented and dominant Nunes and Harrison have proven they can be.
At its essence, it’s a quintessential striking vs grappling matchup. Nunes built her resume with showstopping knockouts, effectively closing the door on an entire era of women’s MMA with statement victories over Tate, Rousey, Cyborg, and Holm. Those fights were nearly a decade ago, but there’s no reason to believe Nunes doesn’t still possess game-changing power. And Harrison will be the most rote striker she’s faced at this level.
But she’ll also be the best wrestler — a two-time Olympic judo champion who’s accustomed to sending larger opponents than Nunes flying to the mat. Each round will begin in Nunes’s world, which is an inherent advantage to the returning legend. But if Harrison can quickly grab hold of her, she might not let go until she hears the bell or feels Nunes's tap.
Distance is everything in all fights, but particularly this one. Nunes is in control if it’s fought at striking distance; Harrison’s winning if it’s within tight grappling range. No need to complicate it.
What’s unknowable is the impact of the days, months, and years these two one-time teammates spent competing against one another on American Top Team mats in the late 2010’s and early 2020’s. It isn’t often that a pair of first-time opponents know one another’s games so intimately. It was years ago, but someone got the better of those sessions and someone else knew they weren’t quite on the level. The residue of that period doesn’t fade easily.
Five rounds is a factor, too. Harrison’s entered championship rounds only twice in her career, both in PFL bouts with Larissa Pacheco. She won the first time and lost the second. An inevitable byproduct of her herculean weight cut is a negative cardio impact, something Harrison’s been able to manage over three UFC rounds. But it remains to be seen how her conditioning holds up beyond a 15th minute, particularly if she’s expending great amounts of energy trying to control a large opponent on the fence or mat throughout the first three frames.
Nunes, of course, was fighting five full rounds without issue regularly during her title reign. But the last time she did it was in 2023 as a 35-year-old. Now she’s 38 coming off an extended layoff that included long periods out of the gym. Never mind ring rust; a great deal of base conditioning is lost when you aren’t training regularly. And Nunes hasn’t asked her body to withstand the unique physical challenge 25 octagon minutes presents in quite some time.
For those reasons and more, considerable uncertainty exists — no matter who wins — as to where both women go next. And there's a real possibility this could be the final time we see either of them.
Nunes already has retired once and, should she win Saturday, it wouldn’t do much for her legacy to kick around defending the bantamweight belt against the Ailin Perez’s and Joselyne Edwards’s of the world. She ought to be in big fights but the dearth of star power within UFC’s women’s divisions narrows that scope awfully quick. Short of a series with Harrison, a trilogy fight against Valentina Shevchenko — who Nunes already has beaten twice — is all that’s left.
Harrison, meanwhile, goes to hell and back merely to make the cut to 135 pounds., which she’s doing for a fourth time this weekend — a fifth if you consider the weeks of dieting leading up to the first time this fight was booked. She competed at over 170 pounds when she won her two Olympic judo gold medals and made a significant drop to fight at 155 pounds in PFL after transitioning to MMA in 2018.
She can only go to the well for yet another 20 pounds of depletion so many times, and unless the UFC has a secret stable of women’s featherweights at the ready, Harrison’s time with the organization is limited lest it devise a way to attach meaningful legacy stakes to future fights.
This is where Shevchenko could enter the picture again, a possibility made easier after the 38-year-old vacated her flyweight title due to injury. There’s little left for Shevchenko to prove at 125 pounds, a division in which she holds the UFC record for most title wins by 10. And what better time than now, during an injury layoff, to properly bulk up for one last run at the 135-pound title in the twilight of her career?
Harrison doesn’t have the same history with Shevchenko as Nunes does, but there could be some motivation in cementing her legacy as the greatest women’s fighter ever with a win over another brand name. She’ll never have the same counting stats as other women’s greats who entered the sport younger than her, but a couple judo gold medals, MMA titles in both PFL and UFC, plus victories over Holm, Nunes, and Shevchenko would make an awfully strong case.
Clearly, a lot hangs in the balance between these two women Saturday night. Not that we should get too preoccupied with the next fight when the current one in front of us is so compelling. But in many ways, the UFC is perpetually about what’s next. And for women’s MMA, that could be unclear as ever if a star-studded, blockbuster era comes to its inevitable close in a few days, capped by the greatest fight it’s ever produced.
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