Dana White isn’t joining the pile-on. The UFC CEO said Amanda Nunes looked good at UFC 334, even though Kayla Harrison submitted her in the fourth round of their women’s bantamweight title fight at Madison Square Garden on Saturday night.
The comments, published by BJPenn.com, came after a night when plenty of people were baffled by what they saw from Nunes. She was sharp on the feet in Round 1, landing clean and looking like the fighter most people remember. Then she kept trying to grapple with Harrison, which is roughly like challenging a shark to a swimming race. Harrison took her back in Round 4 and finished it.
White wasn’t convinced the grappling was a choice.
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“I don’t know if that was necessarily her strategy [trying to outgrapple Harrison], I don’t know,” White said. “Every fighter, in lots of combat sports, who take three years off, they have a hard time of coming back and looking good. I thought Amanda did look good tonight.”
That layoff is the center of his defense. Three years is a long time to be gone in any sport, and Nunes came back against an opponent who walked in at 19-1 and built her entire career on dragging people into places they don’t want to be.
White made that point too, arguing the clinch was always going to happen and that Harrison is the last person on the roster you want to be tied up with. He said he actually thought Nunes held up well there, given Harrison’s background.
He also gave the champion her due for the finish.
“Man, when she got the opportunity to take her back, she snatched her up as quick as you possibly could and beat her the way that she needed to beat Amanda Nunes,” White said.
The rest of the night
Nunes vs. Harrison was the co-main event. Ciryl Gane topped the card by beating Josh Hokit in a heavyweight title fight, and Stephen Thompson picked up one of four performance bonuses after stopping Charles Radtke on the prelims. The promotion has already moved on to the next one: Charles Oliveira vs. Diego Lopes is officially headlining UFC 335.
None of the reporting so far says anything about what’s next for Nunes. No rematch talk, no retirement talk. For a fighter who is widely considered one of the best ever, that silence matters, and she’s the only one who can end it.
Quick take
White is half right. The first round was real, and nobody comes back from three years off and looks like their 2020 self against a world-class judoka. But “looked good” is doing heavy lifting when the fight ended with Harrison on her back in Round 4. The striking was the path. Nunes found it early and then wandered off it, and Harrison did what Harrison does to anyone who lets her get close. If Nunes wants a second crack, she’ll need to answer one question straight: why did she keep walking into the clinch?
