Holly Holm ‘open’ to fighting Cris Cyborg, but no formal offer yet

Newly crowned UFC featherweight champion Cris Cyborg is a frequent presence on social media, so it’s little surprise she’s launched a Twitter campaign to make Holly Holm the beneficiary of her next title defense.

Holm, for her part, isn’t so big on making her matches via social media. But the former three-weight-class world boxing champ and UFC bantamweight titleholder says she’s open to making the match.

“We’re waiting to see if it’s presented or not,” Holm said on Monday’s edition of The MMA Hour. “Its obviously something that, you know, we said we’re open to doing. We’ll see if it happens. ... I know she’s putting it out there saying she’s calling me out and everything like that. But that’s social media, a lot of that I don’t really get into.”

A potential Cyborg vs. Holm fight is an idea that’s been swatted around a few times. The first time it came up was last year, when Cyborg, the former Strikeforce and Invicta strawweight champ, competed in a pair of 140-pound catchweight bouts in the UFC.

Then the discussion turned to a Cyborg-Holm showdown for the inaugural women’s featherweight crown, but for multiple well-documented reasons, the bout turned into Holm vs. Germaine de Randamie instead.

“We’ve talked about it a couple times even, before the 145-pound weight was brought into the UFC,” Holm said. “I had talked to Dana about doing catchweight but she said she didn’t think she’d really want to do that anymore. I said ‘well, I’m open to catchweight, whatever,’ then the 145-pound belt came in and, that’s when she was kind of on like a suspension, so from that point Germaine and I wound up fighting for the belt.”

Holm lost a highly controversial decision to de Randamie at UFC 208, then de Randamie vacated the title rather than defend it against Cyborg. In the meantime, Holm knocked out Bethe Correia at bantamweight, and Cyborg fought and defeated Tonya Evinger to fill the featherweight vacancy.

So only now has the potential for a Cyborg-Holm fight resurfaced.

“Her first fight for the belt was July, which was one month after I fought in Singapore,” Holm said. “So now, there’s been talks about it, but there hasn’t really been, like, this opportunity to make it happen yet. Now that it makes sense, let’s see if it goes through.”

Holm’s not going to put an ultimatum on when a Cyborg fight should happen. But she’s making it pretty clear she’s good to go just about any time now.

“I always want to take whatever opportunity is in front of me and whatever challenges me,” Holm said. “So, yeah, I think it happens but I’m not going to sit here and just focus on that. ... I’m training, I’m at the gym, I’m trying to go 70 percent not a hundred percent so I won’t be burned out, and whatever comes my way I want to be able to go into second gear and go hard.”