Earlier this week Mischa Tate told the media that she and Holly Holm might as well be making daisy chains for each other relative to the garbage-talk interactions between the two UFC 196 headliners.
The same, however, cannot be said for Holly Holm's relationship with the boxing media.
In an interview with Ariel Helwani on Monday's edition of The MMA Hour, Holm lambasted the boxing press for not paying her dues while she was the best female professional boxer on the planet (sidebar: Holm once came close to fighting Ireland's own Katie Taylor).
According to Holm, boxing scribes only began to pay attention to her achievements when she swapped the ring for the octagon:
That's a two-sided thing there. There's probably been more articles written in boxing now that I'm doing MMA. In a way, that's great. Thank you guys for supporting me. But where were you my whole boxing career? I'll call them out on it. I'm not trying to be sweet about it.
It's no secret that women's boxing is criminally underexposed, specifically at professional level; amateur female fighters probably receive more exposure during the Olympics and Worlds than most professional fighters receive in their lifetimes.
Three-weight world champion, Holm, who was twice named RING Magazine's Female Boxer Of The Year, still loves women's boxing. But the current UFC bantamweight champion believes it shouldn't take her transcending of the sport on another platform - a platform which has provided her with both co-main event and main event billing - for the boxing media to pay attention to the women's sport:
For me, it wasn't like, 'Oh I need spotlight.' It was more like, 'Let's have opportunities so that women's boxing can grow.' If it's gonna bring attention to women's boxing, great. But if they ever ask me about it, I'll often call them out on it and ask, why now? You could have been covering this a long time ago.
She continues:
I love that they're supporting, and the fact that it brings any attention to boxing - great. Because I want there to be more attention on women's boxing, because I always wished it was there.
H/T: MMAFighting.com
