Former two-time strawweight champion Carla Esparza announced ahead of time that UFC 307 would be the final outing of her career. After losing the title to Weili Zhang at UFC 281 in November of 2022, she took a long break from her career in order to give birth to her first child.
At the start of the month, she returned for one last dance, coming up against Tecia Pennington in Salt Lake City. Many felt that she deserved to get her hand raised following the final bell but this isn’t how the judges saw it.
The fight was scored as a split decision in Pennington’s favor after judges Stephen Faragher and Dan Furse overruled Sal D’Amato. Faragher gave Esparza the opening round whilst Furse saw all three rounds for Pennington and the fans in Utah certainly let their thoughts on the scorecards be heard.
Esparza obviously wouldn’t wanted to go out with a win but the controversial nature of her final bout hasn’t changed her decision to walk away at this stage. Regardless of the result, the former champion was still treated to a retirement video package from the UFC that capped off an emotional send off for her.
In an interview with MMA Fighting looking back on how things ended, she said that though she didn’t quite get the storybook ending, it’s not something that’s going to keep her up at night.
It’s just hard. Even if I won in the first round via finish or lost a controversial decision, it’s hard to not want to go back no matter what the outcome was. I love fighting but that’s the last one for me regardless. I’m just glad I went out on a good note. It would have been much sweeter to go out with my hand raised but I’d say I’m good with how I left things.
