Miesha Tate is not considering hanging up her gloves, but she may be done with flyweight.
Tate made her 125-pound debut earlier this month, taking on No. 6-ranked flyweight Lauren Murphy at UFC Long Island. It did not go well for her. The former bantamweight champion was thoroughly outclassed, losing a wide unanimous decision to Murphy. The loss is Tate’s second in a row but despite the current skid, “Cupcake” remains in great spirits and says she’s not considering retirement at the moment.
“I’m in a very great point in my life,” Tate said on Unlocking the Cage with Jimmy Smith on SiriusXM Radio. “Not like Chapter 1. Chapter 1 was kind of toxic and I was in a lot of turmoil and that was my outlet and it was also my identity. It’s none of those things for me anymore. So as I continue to evolve, life is great. It’s very kush. I live a wonderful life. I have everything that I need. I don’t need to fight, I just want to. And I want to do better than I did this time. I’m not going to give up on it, but this is a whole new challenge. I just need to get my mindset a little bit more gritty, a little bit more grind. A little bit more ‘gotta have it,’ not just there to have fun, and I don’t feel like I hit the nail on the head with that this time.”
Tate retired from MMA back in 2016 after losing to Raquel Pennington at UFC 205. After a five-year hiatus, Tate returned to the sport in 2021, saying she left the sport while in a dark place but now, had the fire to compete once again. Tate made a successful return, stopping Marion Reneau and earning a Performance of the Night bonus, but lost her next bout to Ketlen Vieira. That’s when Tate decided to make the cut down to flyweight. But with one fight at 125 now under her belt, the former UFC champion is reconsidering that choice.
“I definitely need to take some time to figure it out,” Tate said. “It was a really long camp, it got drawn out two times. I don’t know if I’m going to stay at 125 or just go back to 135 where I can enjoy [my life]. That diet, for that long, made me want to blow my brains out. It was terrible. So I think I might stay at 135. I don’t know. We’ll see. I need a little time to regroup and see where I go from it.”
One of the biggest names in the sport, Tate will have no shortage of willing opponents at 125 and 135 pounds. It’s simply a matter of what weight class and when she’ll be ready to return.
And with Tate still mulling her options, right now she doesn’t really have an idea when that might be.
“As soon as I get a good sports psychologist and start to unravel or figure out how to channel, I think I’ll have more idea,” Tate said. “I don’t know how long it takes. It might be something really quick, I might be a really simple fix. The performance, my physical ability, the shape that I’m in, the way I train, the skill set that I have, is all there. I just need to put it in the right place at the right time, and in the fight. So it might be a quick fix or it might take some time.”
