Miesha Tate: ‘If you want to be entertained, watch ONE Championship’

Following this past Friday’s fun ONE Championship: Enter the Dragon event, a certain headline came out earlier in the week that caught the attention of many of those in the MMA community… new ONE Vice President, Miesha Tate included.

At the event in Singapore, former UFC prospect ‘Super’ Sage Northcutt made his promotional debut when he clashed with the seasoned kickboxer, Cosmo Alexandre. Unfortunately for Northcutt, things would play out completely opposite to how he expected them to.

Alexandre would only need 29 seconds to literally break the 23-year old’s face with one of the most devastating right hands you’ll ever see.

In the wake of the result, Deadspin.com would release an article recapping what had happened. Pretty standard stuff as one would assume. The only problem was that the headline slanderously read; ‘Poor Sage Northcutt gets knocked out 30 seconds into minor league MMA debut.’

Obviously, that’s quite the insult to the biggest promotion in all of Asia as well as just one of the biggest MMA promotions in the world.

When being told about the headline, the aforementioned former UFC bantamweight champion turned ONE VP in Miesha Tate had some thoughts to be shared.

“Definitely not minor league,” Tate responded on MMA on SiriusXM. “It is just not very well known yet in the states but I think that’s changing. To say ‘minor league,’ I mean do we have to draw the comparisons? Right now, ONE Championship is 3-1 in our favor if you want to talk about athletes trading.

“Look, everybody knows the UFC is the brand to compete with right now. Especially in the Western market, not so much Asia. We have four athletes so far that have either come from the UFC or went to the UFC, one of which (Ben Askren) went over and won controversially. We have Eddie Alvarez and Sage losing and then Demetrious [Johnson]. Okay, Demetrious Johnson has been the most dominant and pound-for-pound world champion in UFC history. He barely lost to an Olympic gold medalist. Asked to be released – went over to ONE Championship and had an extremely close first round in his debut and then he got the submission in the second round. But he is one of the best to ever to do it.

“If you want to talk about minor league, the athletes there are far from minor league,” she continued. “We have 130 world champions on our roster, they are badass. I don’t know what else to say. Watch it. If you think it is minor league, if you want to be entertained, watch ONE Championship. We have a 70 percent finish rate. 40 percent is average here in the Western market. So just tune in. Your mind will be changed very quickly.”

Even though it’s unnecessary to debate, just looking at the results themselves, it’s extremely apparent that ONE is indeed not a minor league MMA promotion.

For Tate, it was announced that she’d be taking on this new post-fight career role with ONE in November 2018.

on 5/24/2019