UFC 113

Lore & Background

The card also delivered a statement on the men's side, with Jon Jones dismantling Vitor Belfort in a light-heavyweight bout that reinforced Jones's position as the division's most terrifying prospect. It was the night the sport grew up.

In Their Own Story

The arena hummed with a frequency different from the usual UFC Saturday. You could hear it in the crowd's restlessness, in the way the cameras lingered a beat longer on the fighters' walkouts. Ronda Rousey stepped through the curtain with the quiet confidence of someone who had already won the fight in her head. Miesha Tate met her at the center of the cage, eyes locked, and for a few seconds the two circled like dancers. Then the bell rang. What followed lasted barely two minutes. The guillotine locked in with a soft, almost reluctant pressure, and Tate's face went from focused to vacant in the space of a few heartbeats. The referee's hand came down. The arena detonated. Rousey stood in the center of the octagon, breathing hard, and for the first time in the history of the promotion, a woman held a UFC championship belt under the lights of the main event. She didn't celebrate loudly. She just looked at the belt, then at the crowd, and nodded once. That single nod carried more weight than any roar.

Reader's Guide

Miesha Tate by submission (guillotine choke), Round 1, for the vacant UFC Women's Bantamweight Championship. • First UFC event to headline a women's title fight, permanently reshaping how the organization treated its female roster and the sport's mainstream visibility. • Jon Jones stopped Vitor Belfort in the co-main event, cementing his status as the light-heavyweight division's most dominant force and setting up his eventual title run. For the casual viewer, the night's significance is hard to overstate: it was the moment women's MMA stopped being a footnote and became a headline.

Did You Know?

• Ronda Rousey's guillotine choke on Miesha Tate came in the opening round, making it one of the fastest women's title finishes in UFC history at the time.
• The event's broadcast drew significantly higher viewership than comparable UFC cards of that era, largely attributed to the historic nature of the women's main event and the broad cultural attention it generated.