Two weeks before she was supposed to fight Amanda Nunes at UFC 324, Kayla Harrison couldn’t lift her arm. She was sleeping maybe three hours a night, waking up to what she described as lightning bolts shooting through her. Now the UFC bantamweight champion says she’s healthy, and the fight that fell apart is back on at UFC 334, Nov. 14 at Madison Square Garden, with Harrison’s belt on the line.
Harrison laid out the whole ordeal on the Deep Waters podcast, as MMA Fighting reported. “I feel awesome,” she said, before admitting the start of the recovery was rough on her head as much as her body. She’d gone 10 years without an operation after reconstructive knee surgery between her two Olympics. Then she had four surgeries in the last four years, and this one was the most serious. At one point, she said, she asked herself, “am I ever going to be OK again?”
She’d wanted a disc replacement. The surgeon in New York, where the UFC sent her once the pain got unbearable, shut that down fast. “I had a two-level fusion,” Harrison said. “So I have five herniated discs.” She went under the knife the next morning, still thinking she might make the date. Before that, she’d thrown everything at it: monthly stem cell injections, rigorous PT, muscle relaxers, nerve pain pills, heavier pain pills. Nothing worked.
Years in the making
This fight has been circling for a long time. The two trained together back when Nunes was running through the UFC’s bantamweight and featherweight divisions and Harrison was turning two Olympic judo golds into two PFL tournament titles. By the time Harrison arrived in the UFC in 2024, Nunes had retired. Harrison took the bantamweight title from Julianna Peña by second-round submission at UFC 316 in June 2025, and Nunes announced her comeback that same year.
Peña, for what it’s worth, competes on Nov. 14 too. She makes her Real American Freestyle debut against Diana Avsaragova in Abu Dhabi, her first competition in 17 months.
For all the GOAT talk, Harrison vs. Nunes isn’t the UFC 334 main event. Ciryl Gane and Josh Hokit headline for the heavyweight title Tom Aspinall vacated, and Alex Pereira, who is fighting Sergei Pavlovich at UFC 335 instead, has said publicly that he thought Nunes vs. Harrison deserved the top slot.
Harrison, for her part, says the result won’t define her. “I’m already satisfied,” she said, explaining that the surgery forced her to make peace with her career whether or not she ever fought again. Then the competitor came back out. “This is for me. I don’t need money. We could do it at ATT, this is just for me,” she said, adding that she wants to find out, “Am I who I say I am?”
My take: Pereira’s right about the billing, and this should be five rounds under the main event lights. A two-time Olympic champion coming off a two-level neck fusion against the woman most people already call the best ever is the most fascinating unknown on the whole card. Nobody knows how that neck holds up in the first exchange where Nunes really sits down on a punch, and that’s precisely why I’ll be glued to the screen on Nov. 14.
