Holly Holm Talks About The Time She Got Knocked Out: Listen Up, Ronda!
Holly Holm fought her way into becoming a household name after deep-sixing former UFC Bantamweight Champion Ronda Rousey at UFC 193 earlier this month. Since that time, she has been on a victory tour of sorts, making media appearances at both the local and national levels.
Part of her fame is due to the fact that she is required to speak to the press to promote the UFC, but another part of it is because interest in her is at an all-time high. Take, for instance, her social media following. Prior to scoring the “biggest upset in UFC history,” she barely had more than 100,000 followers on social media.
Now, her Facebook followers alone are over 1 million.
The interest is not likely to die down anytime soon, especially since most of her appearances end with interviewers talking about what a “class act” she is.
For example, after Rousey refused to touch gloves as a sign of respect to start the fight, she could have gone into full gloat mode at having dominated the champ and battered her face.
Didn’t happen.
When people in the press and social media skewered Rousey for losing in such a humiliating fashion, Holly Holm stood up for her opponent and asked people to “stop doing that” on TMZ.
How can one human being be so humble?
Well, it starts with knowing that Holm herself knows a thing or two about humility. As the Inquisitr pointed out in a previous piece, she’s been knocked cold before by former women’s boxing champion Anne Sophie Mathis, and she has no problem talking about it.
In a recent interview with FOX LA, one of the morning anchors asked about her own experience with loss and the time Mathis “beat the crap out of [her].”
“Yes she did. She laid me out,” Holm joked. “Those are breaking moments … or a make-or-break moment … and that fight, actually, in a nutshell, I was winning the first portion of the fight and in the fifth round, she kind of clipped me just right, and I sat down after the fifth and said, ‘You know, she rung my bell a little bit,’ and my coach said, ‘Let’s move around, we have rounds on our side. We still have the rest of the fight.'”
Holly Holm admitted to not listening to that advice, and it led to her getting knocked down in the sixth and finished in the seventh.
“Those are moments where you go back and think, ‘Man,’ you have self-doubt, there’s mind games you play with both your own demons and your own doubt and there were moments when I could have been broken there,” she admitted.
What saved her was when Coach Mike Winkeljohn told her she would take the rematch before she even had a chance to decide, reminding her that “Muhammad Ali’s a legend. He’s been knocked down, and he came back. Why am I any different?”
Holm also noted that she would “start crying” if she went into any more detail.
“So I never doubted myself from that minute on, and I said to myself, ‘I’m going to do this rematch,’ and I came back stronger and I avenged my loss.”
When asked if she thought Ronda Rousey was going through that same crisis now, Holly Holm believed she was, stating that you “don’t be on top for that long” without feeling that way.
“I know for me, I thought if I don’t give myself this opportunity for a rematch, it’s going to bother me for the rest of my life,” she said. “I hate that I’ve been on the other end of it, but it was a life-changing experience for me, and I really learned a lot about myself and other people.”
You can see the whole segment in the video below, with the Anne Sophie Mathis references starting at around the six-minute mark.
If Rousey has any hope for a career after UFC 193, she would be well-served to listen to Holly Holm. The new champ has been there and done it.
[Image via Holly Holm/Facebook]
