History remembers the winners. Liz Carmouche has often been fodder for some of the sport’s biggest victors. Woven through the fabric of women’s MMA, Carmouche has been a constant presence yet often overlooked. But entering her second defense of the women’s flyweight title at Bellator 294, Carmouche has quietly built her resume up to be considered among the best pioneers.

Ronda Rousey is often credited as the driving force behind women’s MMA in the mainstream, rightfully so, but she did not accomplish it alone. Carmouche was in the trenches with Rousey at the very foundation of the UFC women’s divisions. When UFC president Dana White reneged on his inflammatory statement that women would never fight in the UFC, it was Rousey and Carmouche who engaged in the first UFC women’s fight, headlining UFC 157 with the newly-minted UFC women’s bantamweight championship at stake.

A dozen years into her professional career, and after three failed world title bids, Carmouche finally replaced the weight of failed expectations with a championship belt. It was “super validating” for Carmouche to claim the Bellator women’s flyweight championship last April, in what she and many others perceived as her final stand.

“It took understanding that if I didn’t do what I needed to do in my career, I wasn’t getting another shot at the title,” Carmouche told CBS Sports. “I knew that I had it in me. I put in more work than anybody else I’ve ever seen, I’ve ever known. I’m in there seven days a week, 365 days a year. I don’t know if everyone else is. Everybody takes time to go party, to drink, to get fat, to take their time off and have their vacations. I’ve missed funerals. I’ve missed vacations. I’ve missed weddings because I had a dream and I knew I could do it. I just had to keep going.”

Carmouche snatched the title from Juliana Velasquez in Bellator’s last visit to Hawaii, achieving what had long eluded her and avenging her close friend, former champion Ilima-Lei MacFarlane, as she also ended Velasquez’s undefeated run. Carmouche’s cathartic crowning was quickly smothered by accusations of an early stoppage. One more curveball in a career chock-full of disappointing detours.

“That one was hard just because I came out excited feeling like I did it. Not only did I win, but it wasn’t by decision. I finished her. I did everything right. I made some mistakes in the fight, but I came back and I believed in myself and I pushed. I was able to achieve it,” Carmouche said. “But the moment I walked out of that cage, everything changed. All the luster and the excitement of that win were put into controversy and questions and doubt onto everyone thinking that it was going to be recalled and that I didn’t actually win that fight.

“There was a call to arms. I was like, ‘I can’t believe everything I’ve worked for, all this work, and now there’s a chance that I’m going to get a phone call back from Bellator, like, ‘Hey, it got overturned. Sorry, you’re not really the champ.’ The whole time, I’m in Hawaii and trying to enjoy this time with my family, I’m anticipating and waiting for that bad call.”

Thankfully for Carmouche, that call never came. She ended any doubt in their rematch eight months later by securing a second-round submission.

Carmouche had a lot of fuel to channel into a 5-0 Bellator run with four stoppages. Carmouche, still licking the wounds from her loss to UFC women’s flyweight champion Valentina Shevchenko, was released by UFC in December 2019 despite signing a new contract. If that wasn’t painful enough, UFC threw salt in the wounds by informing Carmouche of her release as she was soldiering for the company on a UFC-appointed media tour.

“It felt like a stab to the back,” Carmouche said. “When we go and we do media tours for them, we go to do exactly what I was doing — a week’s worth of media tours — we don’t get financially compensated for that. So I have to take off time from work and take a last-minute flight. While they cover the flight and the hotel, they don’t cover your food. 

“So here I am, I just took off a week and I’m out there losing money by doing this, thinking I’m doing it for the betterment of my career in support of this organization, only to find out, ‘No, you wasted all that money for nothing.’ I had a job, thankfully, to go back to, but ‘What do I do now? I can’t believe this is happening and this is how it was done. You’d asked me to do this.'”

That tough pill washes down better with gold, but the silver lining cut through the darkness of the unknown even back then.

“What I had to take away, even at that moment, was there had to have been a reason that happened,” Carmouche said. “Had I not left UFC, I wouldn’t be a champion in Bellator. I’d say about two years before that fight, I had been cornering my friend Ilima-Lei. I would go and I’d help her in her fights. I saw Bellator and thought, ‘The grass definitely seems greener on this side of things.’ I asked my manager, ‘Hey, can we end my contract with the UFC and can I go fight for Bellator?’ At that time, we weren’t able to make it work. Then lo and behold, I get cut and I was actually able to make my way over to Bellator.”

A second win over DeAnna Bennett on Friday night will extend Carmouche’s active winning streak to six, tying a personal best she set in her debut year of 2010. That is the nucleus of Carmouche’s newfound success. The battle against herself supersedes any challenger. Any additional motivation Carmouche needs she sources from her fellow United States Armed Forces veterans.

“The evolution of me. That’s been the biggest thing moving forward within Bellator,” Carmouche said. “I’m constantly in the gym, striving to learn new things and push myself and push the rim of the glass ceiling and just keep shattering it over and over and over. It’s never been about my opponents. It’s never been about who holds a belt. It’s about seeing myself as a belt holder and what does that mean to me?

“With this, I want to shed a lot more light on veterans and be able to help other veterans out there to achieve their goals and their dreams, to raise suicide awareness, to raise mental health awareness, to be able to help not just veterans, but other people that are in need. For people to see that and to build support systems and use my belt to be able to do that.”

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