Kayla Harrison is still the UFC women’s bantamweight champion, and she still plans to walk into Madison Square Garden on November 14 to defend that belt against Amanda Nunes. This week, though, the two-time Olympic judo gold medalist made it plain that her clock is running. She also revealed that the neck injury that wiped out her first title defense came close to ending her career entirely.
“There were a lot of moments where I questioned if this was gonna be possible, and if I needed to come to terms with the fact that I might be all done,” Harrison said, in comments Ariel Helwani posted on X. She described numbness running down her arm and losing feeling in three fingers. Then came what she called “lightning bolts” of pain, and finally a complete loss of strength in her right arm. She said she went about five days without real sleep. She would drift off sitting upright, only for the pain to jolt her awake. When a doctor in New York told her she needed surgery, she got herself there. “I took an Uber to the hospital. I had surgery by myself.”
Helwani also shared her answer when she was asked whether she’d have returned without the Nunes fight on the table. Harrison didn’t dress it up. Probably not, she said, adding that she was just being honest.
View post on X
On the UFC’s Deep Waters podcast, as Bloody Elbow reported, she put a rough timeline on what’s left. “Not long,” she said. “100 percent until the wheels fall off, but (after) four surgeries in four years, the wheels are a little wobbly, boys.” She also talked about the life waiting outside the cage. She’s a single mother of two, she homeschools her kids, she trains, and she said she hasn’t been on a date in about five years.
How we got here
Harrison came over to the UFC from the PFL and won her first two Octagon fights against Holly Holm and Ketlen Vieira. In her third, she submitted Julianna Pena with a kimura to take the 135-pound title. That was 17 months ago, and she hasn’t defended it since. The Nunes fight was originally booked for UFC 324 this past January, until Harrison’s neck injury pulled it off the card. It has now been rebuilt as the co-main event of UFC 334, and it brings Nunes back out of retirement.
View post on X
Quick take
I keep coming back to the Uber. Picture a woman with two Olympic golds and a UFC belt, unable to feel her fingers and sleeping sitting up. She rides across New York by herself to have her neck operated on. What carried her through the rehab that followed was one name on a fight poster. That kind of honesty changes how I’m watching November 14. Harrison is treating Nunes as the destination. Whatever follows a win at the Garden sounds a lot more like a belt being set down than a line of challengers being called out.
