After Miesha Tate pulled off the upset and took the women’s bantamweight belt off Holly Holm at UFC 196, UFC president Dana White quickly confirmed what many thought: that her next fight would be against Ronda Rousey. Tate seems cool with that plan, assuming Ronda actually returns to the UFC. That’s an assumption Tate and her camp have been seriously questioning.
“I really question her mentality,” Tate told Maxim in a recent interview. “I know whenever I’ve been put through any kind of adversity or come back from a loss, the first thing I want to do when I come back from a loss is to get in the gym and get better. That’s not what I heard from her. I have yet to hear, ‘Oh, I just want to get back in the gym and get better.’ She has other reasons and other things she wants to go focus on, so it just makes me question.”
“She said she wants to have kids with Travis Browne,” she added. “I don’t know where her mind is with everything. I’m not really seeing something that sticks out to me that I can identify with like, ‘Is this a comeback fighter?’ I don’t know.”
“We’re questioning whether she’ll ever fight again. It seems to me like she’s in a weird mental state. And I feel like I’m mentally the best I’ve ever been.”
Tate pointed to her five fight winning streak as proof she’s a different fighter from the first two times she faced Rousey. And Ronda’s aura of invincibility isn’t what it used to be. Miesha said she planned to “exploit holes in [Rousey’s] game.”
“She’s been exposed, for sure.”
(via Maxim, h/t MMA Fighting)