Kayla Harrison says the delay that pushed her Amanda Nunes superfight back by nearly a year was the best thing that could have happened to her. She told MMA Junkie and other reporters at UFC 334 media day in New York that she’s healed from neck surgery and feels more confident than she ever has.
“Like night and day,” Harrison said, describing how her body feels now compared to the lead-up to the original date.
That original date was January, at UFC 324, when Harrison (19-1 MMA, 3-0 UFC) was booked to defend her women’s bantamweight title against Nunes (23-5 MMA, 16-2 UFC). The neck injury forced surgery and scrapped the fight. It’s now the co-main event of UFC 334 this Saturday, Nov. 14, at Madison Square Garden on Paramount+.
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The details of how bad it got are rough. Harrison said she was dealing with what she called lightning bolts of pain while still training full bore for the biggest fight of her career. “I was on the verge of having permanent nerve damage, but I was also training as if I wasn’t,” she said.
After surgery came eight weeks in a neck brace with a 20-pound lifting limit. Then she was cleared to lift around 50 pounds. Another eight weeks after that, she was finally allowed to sprint. She went from an extreme fight diet to no fight diet at all, and she admitted she didn’t feel like herself in her own body.
The mental side was worse. Harrison, 36 and an Olympic gold medalist, said she was in a dark place at times and struggled badly with confidence once she got back on the mat, mostly because she was scared of reinjuring her neck. She also said the neck didn’t bother her when she wasn’t training, which forced some real soul-searching about whether she still wanted to fight at all.
“For a long time, I didn’t, and now I feel more confident than I’ve ever felt,” she said.
She isn’t committing to anything past Saturday. Retirement has crossed her mind, and she said it’s a conversation for after UFC 334, win or lose. “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Harrison said.
The confidence talk isn’t the only Harrison storyline this week, either. Sherdog ran a piece headlined around her UFC 334 weight cut drawing scrutiny before the Nunes fight, so the scale on Friday is worth watching.
Sal’s take
You all know my rule on long layoffs. A fighter who’s been off for most of a year, coming back against an all-timer, is usually where I start looking at the other side. But Harrison’s case is a weird one, because she wasn’t rusty in January, she was hurt. She was training through nerve pain with a fight coming. The layoff fixed the thing that was actually wrong. What I can’t price from a media day quote is the part she was honest about: the fear of hurting her neck again once live grappling started. That matters a lot for a fighter whose whole game is clinching, taking you down and sitting on you for 15 minutes. If she’s back to shooting without hesitation, the surgery looks like it cost her a calendar year and nothing else. If there’s a half-second of flinch in the clinch against a puncher like Nunes, we’ll see it in the first five minutes Saturday night at the Garden.
