Holly Holm says she highly doubts Ronda Rousey will ever want a rematch, but she is still willing to make it happen. Holm said after years of talk around their first meeting that the door remains open on her side, even if she does not expect Rousey to walk through it.
“Yes, a lot of talk with the Ronda fight,” Holm said, adding that she “highly doubt[s] she’ll ever want a rematch.” She said she has “always said since the minute the last fight was over, I’ll always rematch her,” and added, “That’s always been available.”
Holm’s comments came as she was competing for a lightweight world title in boxing on Saturday, a reminder that her career has kept moving while the Rousey chapter has remained fixed in combat sports memory. Their first fight in 2015 ended with Holm knocking out Rousey with a head kick, a result that remains one of the biggest upsets in MMA history.
That night changed both women’s paths. Rousey retired after back-to-back knockout losses, then returned after a 10-year hiatus to submit Gina Carano in 17 seconds in the main event of the first MVP MMA card. She called it a career again after beating Carano, ending another brief comeback before any chance of revisiting Holm could become real.
Holm said she bears no ill will toward Rousey and suggested there is no point judging what happened in that fight from the outside. “But she wanted to come back and have this win and go back and enjoy and have a win like that. No hate from me. I hope she does well. I hope she does whatever she wants with her life. That’s her life. I’d always be open to fight her again,” Holm said.
Rousey’s name kept surfacing around the first MVP MMA card because Holm signed with MVP as her boxing promoter, which helped tie the old rivalry to the present. Holm also noted that Rousey had been much more active in her fighting days, saying she had done that “a lot to women who were ranked at the top.”
The opening against Carano also carried its own weight because Carano had not fought in 17 years and had spent much of the years after her final Strikeforce appearance focused on acting. But it was Holm’s 2015 win over Rousey that still cast the longest shadow, and Holm’s latest comments suggest the one fight that defined both women’s legacies is still the one people most want to revisit.
