Ronda Rousey: The World's Most Dangerous Woman
Ronda Rousey is peacefully asleep inside her wee Venice Beach, California, bungalow, her breathing rhythmic, only one of her feet stirring. Is asleep, not much of a threat to anyone and so unlike how she is when she's in the Ultimate Fighting Championship's Octagon. At times like those, she's a broad-shouldered, evil-eyed fighting fury, capable of wicked overhand rights, various elbow strikes, thudding head punches, an entire panoply of judo throws, mounts, tosses and sweeps, and, of course, her signature fight-ending killer move, the armbar submission.
Not that the world has gotten a chance to see all of this mayhem yet. Her fights, three amateur and 11 pro, with not a single loss among them, tend to end in less than 60 seconds. At the age of 28, she has in four years become the most dominant mixed-martial-arts fighter in the sport's history and was in fact recently named "the most dominant athlete alive," beating out names like LeBron and Mayweather. On the fight scene, there's never, ever really been anyone quite like her. "She's a beast, man," says UFC president Dana White. "She's the greatest athlete I've ever worked with. With her, it's like the Tyson era, like, how fast is she gonna destroy somebody, and in what manner? Ronda's one in a million."
Her next fight, in August against Bethe Correia, is not that far off. She has to train, loves to train, never wants to stop training. Plus, whereas five years ago, after taking time off from her early career as a bronze-medal-winning Olympic judoka, she was a booze-swilling, pot-smoking cocktail waitress who was so hard up for cash that she lived out of her Honda Accord for a spell, she now has her days filled with all kinds of celebrity-type obligations, interviews, photo shoots and various calls from movie people.
Her right foot is jerking around, and her eyelids begin to flutter. The alarm clock next to her is set to go off at nine.
It is now one minute until, and suddenly, in bed, her eyes pop open. Silence surrounds her. She looks at her clock, and all she can think is "Yes! Yeah!" By way of explanation, an hour later — after she's thrown on an old Misfits T-shirt and sweatpants, slurped down a chia-bowl breakfast ("I love the bowl! I crave it!"), said good morning to her big-galoot Argentinian mastiff, Mochi, wandered around her messy, clothing-cluttered living room, looking for stuff to throw in her backpack, and at no time giving any thought whatsoever to putting on makeup — she says, "See, for some reason, I feel like it's a victory if I wake up one minute before the alarm. It's like I'm in a contest with myself, with my foot kicking around until it wakes up the rest of my body. It's the stupidest thing. But it makes me feel like I've already won something."
And so this is how she lives, all day, every day, 24 hours a day, for days and days on end. It's all about winning, in any way that she can.
Until Rousey, the UFC didn't even have a women's division. The very idea of two girls going at it made White uncomfortable. "I don't want to see two women beatin' on each other," he told Time in 2007.
Back then, the most desirable place for MMA women was in a much smaller organization called Strikeforce.
At the time, Rousey had an amateur MMA record of 3-0, her wins accomplished in less than two minutes total. After two equally quick victories in Strikeforce, she was given the chance to take on bantamweight titleholder Miesha Tate. This led to a nasty rivalry that continues to this day.
Rousey once said, "I'm gonna talk a bunch of shit. And I'm gonna break a couple of girls' arms, and I'm not gonna feel the least bit sorry about it."
This got her lots of bad press, but in their early 2012 contest, she backed up her words. At 4:27 in the first round, she hyperextended Tate's elbow with an armbar, ripping through ligaments and forcing her to tap out. Strikeforce later labeled it the Submission of the Year.
Like everyone else, however, it wasn't just Rousey's fight skills that caught White's attention. "She's beautiful, intelligent and very pro-women, which I respect," he says. "And she is psychotically competitive."
In this, as in all things, she will not fail, because she cannot fail, and she cannot fail because she's a winner. It's an unassailable logic that was first drilled into her by her mom, AnnMaria De Mars, herself a former judo champion, who, if she saw her teenage daughter relaxing in bed, say, would jump on her and attempt to get her in an armbar, the message being: Never let your guard down.
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