TMZ<\/a>. \u201cYou can\u2019t just throw somebody else in there. You wait until she\u2019s ready and you do the fight.<\/p>\n\u201cAmanda\u2019s so awesome to work with. I\u2019ve had a great relationship with her since day one. She\u2019s very easy to work with. The surgery went well [for Kayla Harrison]. She should make a full recovery and we should be able to do the fight this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
It was obviously unfortunate timing given that Nunes was coming out of retirement after already missing over two years of action since her most recent fight came back in 2023. Once Harrison\u2019s injury was revealed, Nunes was pulled from the card despite other ranked bantamweights like Norma Dumont volunteering to face her on short notice.<\/p>\n
But White acknowledged that the magnitude for a fight between Harrison and Nunes is just too good to pass up even if that means waiting several months before rebooking the matchup.<\/p>\n
Harrison hasn\u2019t set any timeline for her return to the octagon, although it was initially expected that she might be sidelined for approximately six months after her surgery.<\/p>\n
The UFC won\u2019t rebook the matchup until Harrison is ready to go again but White seems confident that she\u2019ll recover and then the promotion will find a new date for the Nunes fight later this year.<\/p>\n
The fight pits Harrison, a two-time Olympic gold medalist who claimed the UFC women\u2019s bantamweight title with a dominant submission finish over Julianna Pena, against arguably the greatest women\u2019s fighter in the history of the sport in Nunes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Kayla Harrison was forced into neck surgery just days before she was scheduled to face Amanda Nunes in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":428026,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[570],"tags":[64,63,786,1347,785,85,787],"class_list":["post-428025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-mma","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-fighting","tag-latest-news","tag-mma","tag-sports","tag-ufc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=428025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/428025\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/428026"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=428025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=428025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=428025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}