What do you do with a fighter who has cleaned out two divisions?
That is the question after Amanda Nunes added yet another chapter to her legacy as the greatest women’s mixed martial artist of all time Saturday night by making her UFC 250 win over Felicia Spencer look easy. The judges’ scores were 50-44, 50-44 and 50-45, but even those numbers don’t indicate just how one-sided this 25-minute drubbing was.
Attaining champ-champ status is yesterday’s news. We’ve had four of them in the UFC. Conor McGregor never met a belt he wanted to defend. Daniel Cormier was coaxed into relinquishing his light heavyweight belt while defending the heavyweight title. Henry Cejudo vacated the flyweight title, then walked away from the sport after defending the bantamweight belt last month against Dominick Cruz.
Nunes isn’t looking to sell whiskey, become a color commentator, or abruptly walk away while at her peak. Even at a moment when several of her elite contemporaries are going out of their way to create money headaches for the promotion, Nunes just wants to keep proving she’s the very best at what she does, and becoming the first simultaneous dual titleholder in UFC history to successfully defend both championships adds to her claim.
For those who keep track of such things, that’s 11 consecutive victories for Nunes, who hasn’t lost since 2014. She’s recorded eight victories in UFC title fights between her two divisions. July 9 will mark the fourth anniversary of her bantamweight title victory over Miesha Tate. That’s the UFC’s longest current title reign and will be just the sixth four-year reign ever. By defeating Spencer, Nunes now has 10 victories over women who have held UFC, Strikeforce, Bellator, or Invicta championships. Oh, and with June being Pride month, it seems a fitting time to remind that she was the first openly LGBT champion in MMA history.
In her past two fights – against Spencer, and in her bantamweight title defense against former featherweight champ Germaine de Randamie at UFC 245 — Nunes has made it a point to prove she can go the full 25 minutes, an answer to the one previous knock on her, which was that she’d gas during her fights.
That’s bad news for her opponents, and was especially so for Spencer on Saturday night. Spencer, you might recall, took everything Cris Cyborg could dish out last year and went the full 15 minutes in defeat. The loss to Nunes cemented the fact that Spencer is as tough a customer pound-for-pound as any fighter in the business, but that just meant she had a long night. At least Ronda Rousey could say it was over in under a minute.
Nunes was like a cat toying with a mouse, showing off all the weapons in her arsenal, from her powerful and precise striking to her underrated ground game. The one time she seemed to make a concerted effort to end things, toward the end of the fourth, the clock saved Spencer.
(Side note: I’m the first to say corners should throw in the towel more often, but let’s not pretend this was some type of travesty. Spencer took a beating but was cognizant, alert, said nothing in her corner between rounds that indicated she wanted out, never looked like she was waiting for the ref to bail her out, and was in good spirits after the fight. Let’s pick our spots a little better to express our outrage.)
“You saw everything tonight: power punches, she set the tempo, she set the pace of the fight, did what she wanted when she wanted to do it,” White said of Nunes at the UFC 250 post-fight news conference. “Kicks to the leg, kicks to the body, kicks to the head, takedowns, takedown defense, elbows. Everything you can see in an MMA fight, she put out there tonight.”
Amanda Nunes at UFC 250. (Jeff Bottari/Zuffa LLC)
The last time Nunes was even challenged in a fight was against Valentina Shevchenko at UFC 215, and that was three years ago. Both Nunes-Shevchenko fights were close, but Nunes won both times. And with seemingly half the roster threatening to walk away, White’s not about to offer up his 125-pound champ for a potential third loss at this stage of the game when the duo can headline separate cards.
The names near the top of the bantamweight rankings Nunes has yet to defeat – Aspen Ladd, Julianna Pena, and Irene Aldana – aren’t ready. Maybe Nunes’ next fight is a featherweight title defense against Meghan Anderson, who has looked sharp in recent outings.
That’s one semi-plausible opponent out of two divisions. White, for his part, couldn’t even come up with one.
“When you talk about opponents, when you think back to Anderson Silva, Jon Jones, and many others that we were sitting here asking, ‘Who’s next?,’ there’s always somebody next,” White said.
But it’s fitting White is using those names, because we’ve reached the point where Nunes’ championship legacy deserves to be mentioned on equal footing to her male counterparts.
When a fighter reaches this stage, does it even matter who they’re fighting anymore? We’re witnessing an all-time great championship run, and that in and of itself makes each new episode worth tuning in to watch.
Enjoy Amanda Nunes' two-division UFC title run. We might never see another like it. | Opinion
