Holm fights to avoid Buster Douglas jokes

NEW YORK Holly Holm is already the answer to a trivia question as the first fighter to dominate and defeat Ronda Rousey.

Her leap from obscurity to instant celebrity landed her on daytime talk shows and chatting with late-night hosts and made her — oh so briefly — the most talked about fighter in UFC.

She’s trying these days to avoid another rather dubious fight conversation.

Holm’s championship reign lasted only four months, and another loss soon followed that left Holm not as the heir apparent to Rousey in the women’s division, but rather on the cusp of being labeled an MMA version of a one-hit wonder like Buster Douglas. Douglas rode a stunning knockout of Mike Tyson in 1990 in Japan all the way to fight immortality — sports fans can’t forget his name, yet he never had another major victory in his career.

Holm’s not quite there yet, though she was composed enough this week at Barclays Center to answer questions that lumped her in with Douglas.

“After the fight with Ronda, I knew that if I didn’t win after that, those would be things that would be tossed around,” Holm said. “But I’m not in this sport to please everybody else and what they think and what they feel. I’m in it because I love it.”

Holm lost the bantamweight belt when Miesha Tate choked her out in March 2016 and she lost a decision to Valentina Shevchenko in the main event of a Fox card in July. Both fights went five rounds and are the only losses in her career.

She can erase the Douglas comparisons and become the first two-division champion in UFC women’s history when she fights Germaine de Randamie in the main event of UFC 208.