‘It was destiny’: Revisiting Holly Holm’s unfathomable upset of Ronda Rousey, 10 years later

There was a moment, very late in the first round of Holly Holm’s colossal upset of Ronda Rousey on Nov. 14, 2015, when the denial of what was taking place in Melbourne, Australia, came clear. As Rousey ate another left hand and bled from her nose in a fight she was clearly losing, play-by-play man Mike Goldberg trotted out a fanciful line, as if unable to sense the danger of the terrain.

“It takes a lot of energy to be a rock star,” he said.

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Joe Rogan, who 10 years ago still attended UFC pay-per-view events held on foreign soil, sobered things up very quick.

“Well, she’s getting punched in the face,” he said. “It has nothing to do with being a rock star — she’s getting lit up.”

Goldberg’s line in that moment at UFC 193 seems more ludicrous than ever a decade later, delivered right as one of the sport’s greatest stars was facing her first dire adversity. He was like the band that kept playing as the Titanic sunk, cheerful to the end. Yet it illustrated how deeply intoxicated the public was with Rousey and her sheen of invincibility.

Goldberg wasn’t alone. A lot of people were in denial at the scenes reporting back that night from Australia.

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Ten years later, it’s still hard to describe Holm’s upset of Rousey in a way that conveys the magnitude of the feat. For anyone who’s come into MMA in the past few years, there is no equivalent to what she meant to the sport in that moment. It wasn’t Matt Serra shocking Georges St-Pierre, which forever stood as the greatest upset of all time in MMA. It was closer to Buster Douglas dethroning Mike Tyson in Tokyo, which bordered on the impossible.

To this day, to appreciate it is to remember how it felt when Rousey bull-rushed for a takedown early in the second round, desperate to turn things around, and ended up crashing into the fence on a knee. Her downfall was dawning on everyone at the same time, and it made for one of the most impactful shared experiences we’ve had in the sport.

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And the context was everything.

Remember how deeply ingrained Rousey was in pop culture. She had announced the fight in the first place on “Good Morning America.” Though Holm was the former boxing champion, a sweet science Hall of Famer before ever lacing up four-ounce gloves, it was Rousey who graced the cover of the so-called “Bible of Boxing,” The Ring magazine. Rousey was the one showing up in lyrics, becoming a rallying cry at concerts and thriving as a symbol of female empowerment. In fact, it was Rousey who made it so Holm could rise in MMA at all, because Rousey’s star power opened the gates for women in the UFC. To see her getting destroyed was like watching Holm set fire to the same Trojan Horse she arrived in.

Then there were the more glaring details. Rousey, fighting for the third time in nine months, was 6-0 in the UFC, which meant six bantamweight title defenses. Four came via armbar, and two — including her previous bout against Bethe Correia — by knockout. Her prior three fights lasted a total of a minute and four seconds, which was why Rogan said her walkout reminded him of Tyson’s. As a 12-to-1 betting favorite, she was there to thrash a warm body. The suspense of a Rousey fight was not if, but how long.

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Then it all happened. She refused to touch gloves, which was on brand. Then the left hands began sniping. The marks on the face and the blood. The panic in the eyes at understanding she was being outclassed. Then the oblique kicks, the elbows to the temple, the walls crumbling around her world.

Then boom …

The head kick that ended one of the UFC’s most celebrated storylines.

“I’ll tell you something,” Holm tells Uncrowned, thinking back on it all a decade later. “When I was in high school, my dad and I were having this very meaningful conversation. We were both in tears. A lot was going on in life, and he looked right at me right in the eye and he just said, ‘I think that you’re going to do something in this world that’s going to impact people.’ He said, ‘I don’t know, I just feel like it’s destiny — you’re going to do something that’s going to be known.’ He’d only said that once or twice before, that it was destiny.”

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Maybe it was that night at then-Etihad Stadium.

At the weigh-ins the previous day, Rousey showed up to a thundering ovation from the Melbourne crowd and got right in Holm’s face. Holm was unflinching. In fact, she was like a statue, hardened to every form of intimidation. She stuck her left hand out and dragged it across Rousey’s chin as they were separated, as if to portend what was to come. Rousey looked flustered, which to some was a bit of a red flag. Strong emotions can backfire in the fight game. The great photographer Esther Lin caught a shot of that exchange which looked like a Renaissance painting, sweeps of blond hair and bald onlookers, behind a glare that spotlit the actions like enlightenment itself.

Holm, who had only two fights in the UFC at that time, had nevertheless been there before. She had been in a similar situation 10 years prior in the boxing ring against Christy Martin, the first female boxer to appear on the cover of “Sports Illustrated.” When Holm shocked the world that time, the world had no clue it should be shocked.

“That was big boxing fight, and I was a huge underdog,” Holm says. “And my dad was like, ‘I just think it’s destiny. Just go out and do it.’ And then my fight with Ronda, when it came up, a lot of people — because it was only my third fight in the UFC — they were like, ‘What’s the rush?’ ‘You can say no,’ they said, ‘you can wait.’”

There was no waiting. The old proverb is, “Jump and the net will appear,” and that’s what Holm did. She jumped.

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“I said, ‘If I’m not ready now, I’m never going to be ready.’ When I told people that I was fighting Ronda, they would say, ‘Oh, are you excited?’ They didn’t know how to feel about it. I called my dad, too. I said, ‘Dad, I know who my next fight is.’ And he goes, ‘Oh yeah, tell me her name, I’ll look her up.’ I was like, ‘No, it’s Ronda.’ And he goes, ‘Destiny, baby.’ Not even like, ‘Are you sure?’ He just said: ‘Destiny.’”

There was footage in 2015 of all those back home in Albuquerque, New Mexico, watching in a bar, exploding when the fateful head kick landed. Twitter, which was still more of a community than it was a cesspool, flooded with expressions of disbelief. The ESPN ticker blew up. What we had just witnessed had been understood in real time together, and the awe was the common denominator.

Rousey was 28 years old at the time, with horizons so wide they could cover the length of the Pacific she’d crossed to be there. Holm was 34, green in MMA, yet a professional of the highest order, and a champion of boxing. She had a seasoned left hand and knew how to use her range in kickboxing. Her takedown defense was solid, too, though perhaps unsung at the time. In retrospect, the hazards she brought to the table far outweighed her relative inexperience in cage-fighting.

“It was one of those things, and nobody caught this on video, but if you look at that fight, they did catch me hugging my dad right after,” she says. “But they didn’t catch this part, which I’m glad they didn’t — it was our moment. But as my dad walked through the door to the cage, he says, ‘Destiny, baby.’ And I’m like, ‘Yeah.’”

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The image of Holm doing an emotional lap around the Octagon as Rousey lay on the canvas lives on. What she’d just pulled off was registering for her at the same time it was for everyone else.

“It is one of those moments,” she says. “I know it’s the main thing people remember, and it’s the main thing people talk about. I don’t mind talking about it. I mean, it was a great moment in my life and in my career. I know it’s not the only part of my career. I’m proud of what I’ve done in my life, and I’m proud that I’ve been able to have moments in boxing that were huge. Maybe not as worldwide known, because the women’s boxing world wasn’t as big when I was doing it, but I had shocking moments in boxing, too.”

Though revisionists might claim to have foretold of the events that took place on Nov. 14, 2015, nobody saw the 12-to-1 favorite Rousey falling like she did. Except maybe Holm and her old man, who knew perhaps better than anyone what “The Preacher’s Daughter” was capable of.

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Now at 10 years into forever, Holm’s upset of Rousey still sits among the most shocking events to ever happen in the UFC.

“I know it’s not the only defining moment of my whole legacy and all of that,” Holm says. “It’s one of those moments that sticks in people’s heads, and that’s all right.”