According to former UFC bantamweight queen Miesha Tate, Dana White’s firm rejection of women competing in the Octagon fueled her championship aspirations.
Tate, a former Strikeforce gold holder, made her octagon debut in 2013 against Ronda Rousey. While it would not work in her favor, her day would eventually come a few years later.
Co-headlining UFC 196, the Washington native took on incumbent bantamweight champion Holly Holm. Despite the fight going to the deep end, Tate submitted the ‘Preacher’s daughter’ with a late rear-naked choke to win her first gold in the promotion.
These were the early days of women competing in the UFC. Notably, it was done so despite a reluctant Dana White. The former champ posted a video of her greatest hits on Instagram today, ahead of her fight against Yana Santos on May 3, and reminisced about having proven the UFC boss wrong.
“I vividly remember @danawhite say ‘never’ [to females fighting in the UFC]… That only fueled my fire,” Tate posted.
Notably, it was Tate’s former foe, Rousey, who actually changed the game for women in MMA.
How Rousey broke the wheel
White’s statement had come back in 2011, during a chat with TMZ Sports. Interestingly, that mindset would take a back seat once Tate’s former foe and Olympic judo bronze medalist, Rousey, joined the promotion in 2013.
She would then be the promotion’s inaugural bantamweight champion. Rousey would defend the title against Liz Carmouche at UFC 157 and together the pair would become the first women to fight under the UFC banner.
Rousey’s stardom peaked after the win as she would become the first UFC fighter to break into the mainstream, making multiple appearances on prime time talk shows, while making spirited cameos in films like Fast and Furious and The Expendables.
While Rousey’s success inside the octagon would be short-lived, what she did during that time would change the game for women’s MMA.
White admitted to “chauvinistic” mistakes
Interestingly, years later, in a conversation with Rousey in 2022, White admitted his error of his ways but explained why he did what he did.
“When I was saying we’ll never have women in the UFC, I was having a hard enough time getting men fighting in a cage accepted, let alone women“, he told her.
“You approached me, and we had like a 45-minute conversation, and halfway through it I started going, ‘Oh my God, I think I’m gonna do this. And she’s definitely the one to do this with“, the UFC boss noted.
In the years since Rousey, the UFC has seen a handful of dominant and popular female competitors.
Brazilian star Amanda Nunes, widely considered one of the greatest to ever do it two titles in two divisions, defeating Rousey on her way to becoming the company’s most prized female athlete.
To boot, her compatriot, Cris Cyborg, also managed to set the promotion on fire during her dominant featherweight run.
And it’s not just been about the big names and the titles, the quality of fights in the UFC in the women’s divisions has seen a massive uptick in recent years.
The now-retired Joanna Jedrzejczyk and the current strawweight champion Zhang Weili turned in the 2020 Fight of the Year in a hellraising five-round clash that broke almost every striking record ever set in the promotion.
With stars like two-time Olympic gold medallist Kayla Harrison, now part of the promotion, White hopes to continue marketing his product to a demography that he himself used to consider too frail for the sport.
Thankfully, that situation has changed since.
“I’m not gonna lie, there’s a little bit of that — being a man — little chauvinistic,” White told BASIC! When Cable Was Cool in 2022.
But by his own admission, “In a million years, I never saw this coming; where these women would be so technical, and so tough, and so badass…”
