When Ronda Rousey is training for a fight, she spends a week eating nothing but salty food. She wants to get bloated, so that when she eliminates salt from her diet, in the final days, her body expels all the fluid it can find. After a couple of steam baths, what remains of her weighs almost exactly a hundred and thirty-five pounds, the limit for the women’s bantamweight division of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. In the sport once known as cage fighting and now known as mixed martial arts, the U.F.C. is the dominant company, and she has become its dominant personality, despite the fact that not long ago its president was promising never to promote a fight between women. Rousey is a former judo champion, and she won her first eight M.M.A. fights with a move known in judo as juji gatame, which can be painful to contemplate, let alone receive: it is a type of arm bar designed to hyperextend an opponent’s elbow, stretching ligaments, tearing the articular capsule, and even grinding away the bone if the opponent doesn’t concede quickly enough. Outside the cage, Rousey is genial but unapologetic about her capacity to inflict harm. When, recently, she submitted to a brief interview on “American Idol,” Ryan Seacrest jokingly flinched as she greeted him. “I don’t fight for free,” she said. “Don’t worry.”
Although the U.F.C. packs arenas all over the world, it still isn’t quite mainstream, which means it is only an occasional presence on “SportsCenter” or sports radio. Its most important chroniclers can be found at the monomaniacal Web sites that keep track of its proliferating story lines: upsets and comebacks, crackups and busts, idle threats and infelicitous tweets. In this small world, Rousey’s ascent hasn’t been uniformly celebrated. In 2011, the editors of an irreverent blog called CagePotato declared Rousey their “new obsession.” These days, she is so polarizing that they can joke about “the M.M.A. commentsphere’s seething hatred of all things Ronda Rousey.” For her part, Rousey says she isn’t bothered by the evidence, online and in arenas, that many of the people who pay to watch her fight are hoping to see her lose. “I’m the heel, I’m the antihero,” she says. “And I like it that way.”
This February in Venice, California, it was still chilly when Rousey woke up, at four-fifteen, and made herself some eggs: spinach, turkey bacon, lots of pink Himalayan salt. She lives in a comfortably unkempt house, not far from the boardwalk, that she shares with three other female fighters—they call themselves the Four Horsewomen, in tribute to an old professional wrestling team—and a ninety-pound Argentinian hunting dog named Mochi. Her roommates were still asleep when she left to begin her daily commute: thirty miles across Los Angeles to the Glendale Fighting Club, a one-story anomaly on South Brand Boulevard, which is otherwise lined with luxury-car dealerships. She had to be there early for a series of live interviews with KTLA, which was interrupting its morning show to give viewers a preview of Rousey’s upcoming fight, her ninth, against a talented but relatively unknown wrestler named Sara McMann. The crew was setting up when Rousey walked in, wearing dark-blue stretch pants, a wide-neck teal top, and a black blazer—she had dressed in the dark, and she worried aloud that her outfit didn’t match. Her trainer, Edmond Tarverdyan, was more interested in talking about McMann. “You always look beautiful, and all that matters is you’re going to kick her fuckin’ ass,” he said.
Rousey smirked back. “Notice he didn’t say, ‘No, you match!’ ”
In M.M.A., more than in most sports, athletes must be promoters, too. Rousey is smart enough to know that one of her promotional assets is the way she looks—she has appeared on the cover of not only ESPN the Magazine but also Maxim, which called her “Badass & Blonde,” and photographed her in a garment that seemed highly unsuitable for combat. Of course, this asset can be a liability, too, especially for a female fighter seeking the same respect given her male counterparts. Rousey is five feet six, and even someone who didn’t recognize her might guess, glancing at her powerful arms and shoulders, that she was some sort of athlete. But while some fighters strike an impassive pose, shrugging off questions the way they shrug off the dangers of the cage, Rousey is nothing if not expressive. She smiles often, squinting so tightly that her eyes disappear. She cries easily, a girlhood habit she never outgrew. And before each fight she glares at her opponent as if she were getting ready to put a permanent end to a lifelong feud. After the fight, she is all smiles again, and usually unblemished. “Somebody told me once that it’s the pretty fighters you have to watch out for,” she says, slyly. “If someone’s all gnarled and mangled up, obviously they’ve been getting hit a lot.”
Rousey speaks more or less the way she fights: in measured provocations, never committing herself to a gambit that she can’t defend. When KTLA cut to her in the gym, she talked politely about McMann’s wrestling achievements, and about their parallel careers: McMann won a silver medal in wrestling at the Athens Olympics, while Rousey took bronze in judo at Beijing. The goal, after all, was to persuade fans to pay $54.99 to watch the two women fight, live from Las Vegas, on pay-per-view. But once the cameras left she assessed her chances more candidly. She predicted that McMann would fall back on her old wrestling moves for fear of Rousey’s brutal arm bar. “I don’t think that this matches up well for her,” she said. “I wouldn’t say that in a pre-fight interview, and I haven’t. Because it doesn’t make sense in order to sell it. I need people to doubt me.” She laughed. “And, besides, these guys”—she nodded toward Tarverdyan and his assistants—“put large sums of money on me winning, and they always get shitty odds. So I want to help them out.” She looked up. “Edmond, do you know the Vegas odds for this fight?”
“Three-ninety-five,” he called back. A bettor would have had to lay three hundred and ninety-five dollars on Rousey in order to make a hundred if she won. Still, that meant the oddsmakers were giving McMann a better chance than they had given many of Rousey’s previous opponents.
Perhaps the observers in Las Vegas were impressed by McMann’s wrestling pedigree, or perhaps they were taking note of the events of 2013, a year when Rousey’s growing celebrity interfered with her training schedule. She took a ten-month break between fights, during which she acted in a pair of film sequels: “Fast & Furious 7,” which is due out next year, and “The Expendables 3,” with Sylvester Stallone leading a team of VHS-era action heroes (Arnold Schwarzenegger, Wesley Snipes, Dolph Lundgren). Rousey also served as a head coach on the eighteenth season of “The Ultimate Fighter,” the U.F.C.’s reality show, in which up-and-coming fighters live together while competing in a tournament to win a U.F.C. contract. She loved her team—two of its members are now her roommates—and hated everything else, especially the rival coach, Miesha Tate, whom she considers a phony. Rousey had fought Tate and beat her, two years earlier, in a short, devastating bout that did more than any other to make Rousey a star. When they fought again, last December, after the show’s conclusion, Rousey didn’t look quite so sharp: for the first time, she allowed a fight to progress beyond the first round. She was into the third when she finally isolated Tate’s left arm and bent it backward, at which point Tate used her free hand to tap lightly on Rousey’s leg, signalling submission and ending the fight. As they stood up, Tate offered Rousey a handshake and Rousey refused. “A handshake means something to me, and she hasn’t earned it,” Rousey explained in a post-fight interview. The arena booed her, confirming her paradoxical status as a popular heel.
The U.F.C. asked Rousey to fight again, on February 22nd—only eight weeks later. (Members of the U.F.C. élite typically fight about twice a year.) Rousey agreed, partly because, after a chaotic year, she liked the idea of sticking to her training routine for two more months. Tarverdyan liked it, too. He is an Armenian-born kickboxer, not quite retired, and his normal posture is a fighter’s crouch. “She would beat some of the one-thirty-five guys,” he says, with a shrug, as if to imply that listeners could disbelieve him at their own risk. He was preparing to supervise her afternoon sparring session, the last before the fight. The first opponent was Shayna Baszler, one of the Horsewomen, who is also a pioneer of women’s M.M.A.; her first fight was in 2003.
In the cage, Rousey stood straight and maintained eye contact, like an attentive yoga teacher. As soon as the timer chimed, she rushed in, pushing Baszler back with punches to the stomach. For a moment, Rousey paused and reëstablished eye contact with Baszler, as if to remind her that this was what they had agreed to. Then she started again, and by the end of three rounds Baszler’s headgear had been knocked around so much she could barely see, and her nose was dripping blood onto the mat. A gym worker arrived with a roll of paper towels, and Baszler staggered off as Tarverdyan unlaced Rousey’s gloves to inspect her fists, in preparation for the next session.
In some ways, the word “fight” is misleading: a mixed-martial-arts match is an athletic event and a brainteaser. Rousey says her job is to figure out how to respond to her opponent’s attacks and lapses, and then train until those responses become reflexes. But she also knows that M.M.A. wouldn’t be so popular if its matches didn’t provide a rough facsimile of street-corner fistfights, and if even the most erudite fans didn’t find themselves, at least once or twice a night, howling for violence. Rousey herself isn’t immune to this temptation to confuse a fight with a fight, and she says that, inevitably, there comes a time in training camp where mere technical superiority doesn’t seem like enough. She says, “I always think to myself, If I ran into them in a parking lot and they slapped my little sister, would I be able to beat the hell out of them? And the answer is always Yes, I would.”
The U.F.C. has its headquarters in Las Vegas, one of the biggest cities in the country without a major professional sports franchise. In the week before Rousey’s match, Las Vegas seemed like a company town, purpose-built to host not just a big fight but also the weeklong festival of hype and speculation that precedes it. On Wednesday, the main fighters held light training sessions on the floor of the Mandalay Bay arena, so the press corps could gather B-roll footage and specious insights about their health and strategy. After McMann’s workout, she ascended to a chair on a small platform, ringed by digital voice recorders. She seemed to shrink, answering softly and honestly when a reporter asked whether, if she were caught in one of Rousey’s arm bars, she would quickly submit in order to avoid injury. “If somebody catches you and they get the better of you, I don’t feel like there’s any need to be an idiot,” she said. This was sensible, but also worrying—confident fighters don’t typically allow themselves to talk about how they might lose. Fifty or so spectators had wandered over from the adjoining casino, and they let out a cheer when Rousey and her crew took their place on the arena floor. She did some mitt work with Tarverdyan, concentrating on her left hook, and when she was finished she tossed her hand wraps into the crowd and sat for the media. Although she meant to praise McMann’s skill, Rousey couldn’t resist criticizing her attitude, too. “I’m more of a fighter than she is,” Rousey said. “She has a kid at home, and she has to go home to that kid. I can afford to be selfish, where she can’t. I’m willing to die in there.” This last vow is a ludicrous pre-fight cliché, but Rousey’s blank expression made it seem almost believable—a useful skill, no doubt, for anyone who seeks work alongside Sylvester Stallone. By the end of the day, the phrase “willing to die” had appeared in headlines on all the important blogs.
The U.F.C. now presents about one pay-per-view fight every month, averaging hundreds of thousands of buys per fight—an enviable business model but a hungry one, since it requires that fans be convinced anew, every month, not just to watch but to buy. The company also broadcasts dozens more events on Fox channels and through an online subscription service, sometimes threatening to exhaust the pool of fighters whom people actually want to watch. A week before Rousey’s appearance, a popular light heavyweight named Rashad Evans had injured his leg and pulled out of his fight against Daniel Cormier, who was quickly ascending the U.F.C. rankings. The company, scrambling for a replacement, found Patrick Cummins, a former collegiate wrestler who had been working at a coffee shop; some fans called him the Brawling Barista. One reporter mentioned that Cummins was a fifteen-to-one underdog, and suggested that he should bet on himself. “I would love to,” Cummins said, grinning. “I just don’t have any money.” Dana White, the president of the U.F.C., tried a stratagem familiar to fight promoters everywhere. “This is the real ‘Rocky’ story,” he said, deploying the long odds as reason to watch, rather than reason not to.
White looks and talks a bit like a fighter. He is forty-four, bald and stocky and sarcastic; on M.M.A. blogs and sports-talk shows, he often outshines the athletes, most of whom are less famous than he is. Rousey is one of the exceptions, and the previous week White had called her “the biggest star we’ve ever had”—an encomium shrewdly calculated to keep fans arguing until fight night. Of course, M.M.A. fans hardly needed extra encouragement to argue about Rousey, who is marketable partly because of her willingness to play the heel, or maybe her inability not to. When people ask her why she didn’t shake Tate’s hand, she likes to respond by reminding them of Muhammad Ali, the ultimate heel-turned-hero, and the classic photograph of him in 1965, roaring at the crumpled body of Sonny Liston. She says, “How unsportsmanlike is that? But everybody loves it, don’t they?”
The Ultimate Fighting Championship began with the sort of question a ten-year-old boy might ask: What kind of martial arts is the best? A Brazilian-born fighter and teacher named Rorion Gracie thought he knew. His father, Hélio, had helped create a technique known as Brazilian jiu-jitsu, or B.J.J., a quick and fluid style in which the fighters spend much of their time on the mat, scrambling for position, tangling and untangling their limbs as each tries to make the other submit. For the first Ultimate Fighting Championship, in 1993, Rorion Gracie and his partners summoned entrants from around the world: a karate-trained kickboxer from the Netherlands, a professional wrestler from Georgia, a sumo wrestler from Hawaii, a boxer from St. Louis, and, naturally, a B.J.J. specialist, who also happened to be Rorion Gracie’s younger brother, Royce. This was a one-night, eight-man tournament, held in an arena in Denver and broadcast live on pay-per-view, and it was advertised with a promise that was neither true nor, in the long run, helpful: “There are no rules!”
One of the announcers was Jim Brown, the legendary football player, who began by paying tribute to the athletes. “These guys are experts in what they do—they’ve trained for years,” he said. In fact, many of them didn’t know quite what to expect. They were to fight in an octagonal cage surrounded by a chain-link fence, monitored by a referee but not by judges; the contest would end only when one participant was unwilling or unable to continue. The first fight matched Gerard Gordeau, the Dutch kickboxer, against Taylor Wily, the Hawaiian sumo wrestler. Wily ran at Gordeau, who sidestepped him, shoved him to the ground, and kicked him in the face, ending the fight and proving definitively that sumo wrestlers are best suited to sumo wrestling. (For the rest of the night, Gordeau fought with a painful disadvantage: fragments of Wily’s teeth lodged in his right foot, too deep to be immediately retrieved.) The tournament winner, as might have been predicted, was Royce Gracie, who choked Gordeau into submission.
Almost ninety thousand people bought the first U.F.C. on pay-per-view; four months later, the sequel, U.F.C. 2, attracted more than a hundred and twenty thousand, and a growing backlash. Bill (Superfoot) Wallace, a karate champion who had been part of the original broadcast team, used his column in the magazine Black Belt to point out that these “no holds barred” fights didn’t quite live up to their billing. “I don’t see why they couldn’t allow groin kicks,” he wrote. Those with more delicate sensibilities had different objections. The American Medical Association warned that M.M.A. was “even more physically dangerous and morally abhorrent” than boxing, and called the matches “blood-filled brawls” that deserved to be banned; Senator John McCain denounced M.M.A. as “human cockfighting.” This was excellent publicity, but it started to threaten the U.F.C.’s business. State athletic commissions moved to prohibit M.M.A., and by the late nineteen-nineties the major cable companies were refusing to carry the U.F.C.’s pay-per-view broadcasts.
In an effort to improve its reputation, the U.F.C. adopted a number of rules. It imposed time limits on fights (three five-minute rounds, or five, if a championship was at stake), and installed judges to determine a winner if both fighters endured. Knees and kicks to the head of a downed opponent became illegal (though too late for poor Taylor Wily), and so did strikes to the back of the head or to the spine. Fighters were required to wear lightweight fingerless boxing gloves, and they were separated into weight classes, the way boxers are. But the cable companies were reluctant to bring back M.M.A., because it wasn’t sanctioned in Nevada, the state with the most influential athletic commission. In 2001, the owners of the U.F.C. sold the company to a pair of casino owners, Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, who had a better relationship with Nevada’s athletic commission. (Lorenzo had been a member until six months before.) The sport gained Nevada approval and returned to cable, just as the Fertitta brothers began a years-long marketing campaign that succeeded in making the U.F.C. seem fun, instead of scary—a more exciting version of professional wrestling. In 2006, according to estimates, a U.F.C. pay-per-view event drew more than a million buyers for the first time.
Some viewers will inevitably be disturbed by a sport in which fighters who knock down their opponents are expected to dive onto the mat and keep punching until the referee intervenes. But this sequence is generally quicker and quite possibly less harmful than what happens in boxing, where a downed fighter who rises before the count of ten receives a cursory examination and gets sent wobbling back to absorb more punches. “Quite possibly less harmful than boxing” is, no doubt, a faint endorsement for any human endeavor, but, considering the reputation M.M.A. developed in the nineties, this mixed verdict represents a distinct improvement. No fighter has ever died from a U.F.C. fight, and M.M.A. events are now legal everywhere except New York, where the sport has been stymied by union groups seeking to organize the Fertittas’ casinos. Today, a viewer who tunes in to the U.F.C. expecting carnage might be surprised to see something that looks recognizably like athletic activity: often, the fighters spend much of their time feinting and striking, or else wrestling on the ground; from time to time, fans complain that too many fights end, anticlimactically, with the judges’ decision.
The new U.F.C. minted stars like Chuck Liddell, known as the Iceman, a blunt-spoken kickboxer and folk hero with a mohawk and a reputation for conviviality. (Once, when White called Liddell a few hours before a championship fight, he answered the phone with a brusque valediction: “Can’t talk now, I’ve got two girls in the shower, gotta go.”) And starting in 2005 the U.F.C. began producing its cable reality show, “The Ultimate Fighter,” which reached casual viewers who weren’t yet ready to invest in pay-per-view. All along, there were competing promotions, but most struggled to build a stable business in a sport as unstable as professional fighting, where months of planning can be ruined by a single pre-fight injury or contractual dispute. Right now, the U.F.C.’s chief competitor is Bellator, owned by Viacom. But Bellator remains a minor league, and it hasn’t done much to change the perception that the U.F.C. is something of a monopsony; for an ambitious fighter, a U.F.C. contract is the only one that really matters.
Of course, most popular sports are virtual monopsonies: a football player seeking employment has few options besides the N.F.L. But those sports have competing teams, and labor unions that resist efforts to limit pay. In boxing, which has no real structure, fighters get whatever promoters think they’re worth, which can be a lot. Floyd Mayweather earned at least thirty-two million dollars for his last fight, and three other boxers on the bill earned more than a million apiece. By comparison, pay in the U.F.C. can be surprisingly modest. According to the contract filed with the Nevada commission, Rousey’s guaranteed compensation for the McMann fight was only fifty-five thousand dollars, although she stood to earn double that if she won. The official, public contract is only a baseline; after each fight, the U.F.C. hands out extra payments, some of which are publicized—both the winner and the loser of the most entertaining match get fifty-thousand-dollar “fight of the night” bonuses—and some of which are kept confidential. (Top fighters can also earn seven-figure signing bonuses, shares of pay-per-view revenue, and other incentives. The U.F.C. bought Rousey a BMW X6 M, to replace her beat-up Honda Accord.) White likes to say that the U.F.C. takes good care of all of its fighters, but there’s no way to know for sure, especially since few of them have anything to gain by complaining publicly. Rousey says that she has maintained a good relationship with the U.F.C. by taking the long view. “I’m not going to throw a fit over a little bit of money now, when I feel like letting that slide and just putting out good performances will pay off way more in the future,” she says.
In many martial arts, the idea of fighting for money is new, or newly rediscovered. Rousey is a second-generation judo player, or judoka: in 1984, in Vienna, her mother, AnnMaria De Mars, became the first American, man or woman, to win gold at the World Judo Championship. These days, De Mars is a cheerful presence at her daughter’s fights (especially once they are over), but she remembers herself as an angry young woman. Before more than one match, De Mars accosted her opponent, shoving her and snarling, “Bitch, I’m going to break your fucking arm today!” Women’s judo didn’t become a full-fledged Olympic sport until 1992, so there wasn’t an obvious next step for a world-champion female judoka. By the time Rousey was born, in 1987, De Mars was working toward a Ph.D. in educational psychology at the University of California, Riverside. “I never wanted to do judo as a career,” De Mars says. “I figured there’s a lot of things in life, and I had done that part of it.”
Rousey’s birth was eventful: she was choked out by the umbilical cord, which wrapped around her neck and deprived her of oxygen long enough to damage her brain. She didn’t speak her first sentence until she was six, and even then she was difficult to understand. (She speaks clearly—and quickly—now.) The family moved to North Dakota, where Rousey’s father, Ronald, practiced pronunciation with her and encouraged a growing interest in competitive swimming. In 1995, suffering from a degenerative spine injury caused by a sledding accident, Ronald Rousey committed suicide. Rousey still struggles to explain how his death affected her, and wonders if it’s even right to mention it. “I feel like I’m prostituting his memory for my own career gain,” she said, sobbing, during a U.F.C. special. “And it makes me feel like a fucking asshole.”
Three years after his death, when she was eleven, Rousey quit swimming and took up her mother’s sport, which also meant submitting to her mother’s ruthless training methods. At home, De Mars sometimes woke Rousey up in the morning by trying to catch her in an arm bar—the lesson was to always be prepared. When Rousey tore the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee, another parent at the dojo had to persuade De Mars to take her to a hospital. Once, during a mother-daughter workout, Rousey fractured De Mars’s wrist, but De Mars didn’t tell her until years later, when Rousey asked why they no longer trained together. All this toughness transferred to Rousey, but the stoicism didn’t: for years, she cried at nearly every practice, and sometimes she would cry in competition, too, even when she won, passing seamlessly through stages of anxiety, frustration, and relief. During her judo years, Rousey kept a blog, now deleted, which provided a vivid chronicle of her single-minded life. “I can’t describe the way losing hurts,” she wrote, after an overtime defeat in the final round of a prestigious tournament in Tokyo. “The whole time I’m crying the salt from it stings every bit of matburn on my face and I just wanna curl up and disappear.”
Rousey ascended fast—at sixteen, she was ranked No. 1 in America—but she never quite resigned herself to the life of a full-time judoka. She dropped out of high school (she eventually earned a G.E.D.) and travelled constantly, spending unhappy years based in Wakefield, Massachusetts, where many top judokas trained for the Olympics. The constant pressure to make weight exacerbated her insecurity about her thick, muscular body; she became bulimic, obsessing over her appearance as she struggled desperately to qualify for her weight division, which was sixty-three kilograms, or just under a hundred and thirty-nine pounds. (At twenty, she moved up to fight at seventy kilograms, which is just over a hundred and fifty-four pounds—twenty pounds higher than the weight she competes at now, with the help of a nutritionist and the occasional salty meal.) “Whenever people talk about how cocky and arrogant I am, it blows me away, because I worked so hard to develop self-confidence,” she says. She recently held a fund-raiser for Didi Hirsch Mental Health Services, which treats eating disorders. And when she was photographed for Maxim she intentionally arrived sixteen pounds over her fighting weight, because, she says, she didn’t want to glamorize her body in an “unhealthy” state.
In 2008, in Beijing, Rousey lost a close decision in the semifinals, then won the next two matches to win a bronze medal—the first time an American woman had medalled in judo. A week later, Rousey was suffering from a feeling of disenchantment that is common to Olympians, especially successful ones, who must suddenly confront the formlessness of post-Olympic life. “I dunno, maybe I’m just stressing about nothing,” she wrote, on her blog. “I’m at the Olympic village, have finished fighting, have no responsibilities, waking up at 2pm and not the slightest clue of what day or date it is.” She was also starting to worry about the blog itself, which was avidly read and debated in the insular judo world, where some considered Rousey a loudmouth and a brat. “I really do try to be a good person,” she wrote, “but sometimes I just feel like deep down I’m a selfish egomaniac and there’s nothing I can do to make up for it.”
For a while, Rousey considered training for the 2012 Games: she would have been twenty-five, prime age for a judoka of her size. Yet she was starting to realize that being an Olympian was a distinction but not a career—her reward for winning bronze in Beijing had been, in her words, “ten grand and a handshake.” She eventually decided that a chance at gold wasn’t worth four years of misery, so she entertained other options. Her mother wanted her to go to college, and she thought she might enjoy becoming a helicopter rescue swimmer for the Coast Guard. The third choice, and the riskiest, was professional M.M.A., which would give her a chance to get paid for her judo skills—but only a chance. De Mars remembers her reaction: “I told Ronda, ‘That’s the most stupid-ass thing I ever heard!’ ” She was skeptical that women’s M.M.A. would ever be a viable business, but she gave Rousey a year to make some progress, and let her move back into the family house, in Santa Monica, while she looked for an apartment. On May 9, 2010, Rousey took to her blog to issue a formal proclamation: “I finally feel like I’ve realized what I want to accomplish next and made the decision to f**k all and go for it.”
In judo, punches and kicks are banned. Players score points by throwing or tripping their opponents or, less often, with a pin or a submission hold. But most of the time the two judokas stand and face each other, grappling for position. A judoka must wear an outfit known as a gi, which comprises pajama trousers, a cotton belt, and a thick, wide-sleeved jacket, designed to endure rough treatment. A strong grip is one of a judoka’s most important assets, and as the players push and pull, each clutching fistfuls of lapel, they can resemble two drunks having a spirited debate.
In order to escape judo, Rousey would have to learn how to grapple without having a gi to grab hold of. She trained with Manny Gamburyan, a fellow judo competitor who had earned a U.F.C. contract. Gamburyan was part of a tight-knit society of Armenian-American fighters clustered around the Valley, who were known for their toughness and for their loyalty to one another. They adopted Rousey, who is affectionately known as the “white girl” of the crew. (In fact, though Rousey is fair, her ancestry, on her mother’s side, is Venezuelan and Caribbean; one of her great-grandfathers was a pioneering black doctor in Canada.) She also started learning the basics of boxing, and how to throw knee and elbow strikes using techniques borrowed from a Thai discipline called muay thai. Because her judo skills were so imposing, she didn’t need to be a great striker right away, though she is proving herself a fast learner—her left hook, which Tarverdyan says is less than a year old, is now one of her most effective weapons. “I know she wanted to punch those girls, lots of days,” De Mars says, thinking of Rousey’s judo career. “Now she gets to.”
Rousey began her career with some amateur M.M.A. fights, and immediately ran into a problem: promoters had a hard time finding opponents eager to test themselves against an Olympic medallist who could hold her own with guys from the Armenian gyms. For her professional début, with a regional promotion called King of the Cage, the matchmaker, Shawn Ramage, had to import an opponent, Ediane Gomes, from Brazil by way of Florida. “I tried to be up front with people,” Ramage says. “I just let them know, this girl beats up guys.” The fight lasted less than thirty seconds: Rousey grabbed Gomes, pushed her to the ground, straddled her, punched her in the head, and, as Gomes rolled away to avoid further punishment, isolated her right arm and pulled it straight, then beyond straight. Gomes ceded immediately, and Rousey had the first professional victory of her thirteen-year career in martial arts. Her payment was eight hundred dollars.
At the time, the U.F.C. had never put on female fights, and even now White is inclined to defend his initial reluctance. The night of Rousey’s fight in Las Vegas, billed as U.F.C. 170, White was sitting in a cinder-block dressing room at the MGM Grand, waiting for the main show to begin. “I went to a fight up in Northern California about eight or nine years ago, and I saw this woman that looked like Chuck Liddell fight this girl who looked like she had about five Tae Bo classes,” he said. “And I said, ‘I’m never going to be in this business, man.’ ” For years, the only prominent women in the U.F.C. were the Octagon Girls, in little shorts and littler tops, whose job is to hold up giant cards identifying each round. None of them bear even a faint resemblance to Chuck Liddell.
Women’s M.M.A. first started to build momentum less than a decade ago. In 2007, Showtime broadcast a fight card that included a telegenic rising star named Gina Carano, who pummelled her opponent while three male announcers provided commentary. (They were mainly respectful, though at one point they disagreed, chucklingly, about whether a female fighter could beat them up.) Two years later, Carano fought for the first time as a headliner, again on Showtime, at an event promoted by Strikeforce, which was then the U.F.C.’s main rival; her opponent was Cristiane Justino, a brawny Brazilian known as Cris Cyborg. The referee stopped the fight in the closing seconds of the first round, as Carano, curled in the fetal position, absorbed a series of thudding punches to the head. Despite the loss, Carano was becoming M.M.A.’s first woman crossover star. A week after the fight, she met with Steven Soderbergh, who had evidently been more impressed by the loser than by the winner: he cast Carano in the lead role of his 2011 action movie “Haywire.”
In 2011, though, Strikeforce was struggling; by the time Rousey joined its roster, that summer, Strikeforce had been acquired by Zuffa, the holding company through which the Fertittas control the U.F.C. Everyone knew that the most promising men would eventually be boosted into the bigger league, but no one could say what would become of the women. Rousey viewed her Strikeforce fights as auditions—chances to convince the U.F.C. that there was money to be made from female fighters. When she fought Miesha Tate for the first time, early in 2012, the two women built anticipation for the fight by sniping at each other through interviews and social media. Tate asserted that Rousey hadn’t yet earned the right to fight her; Rousey replied that she was a lifelong athlete, while Tate was “just some chick who decided in high school it’d be cool to wrestle, and a few years later decided it’d be cool to do M.M.A.” Perhaps more relevant, Rousey acknowledged that she found Tate “more annoying than chewing tinfoil”—she seemed to view Tate’s professedly “fun” persona (her nickname is Cupcake) as an affront to the sport.
After all the buildup, followed by Rousey’s dominant victory, the owners of the U.F.C. were forced to pay attention. In late 2012, they finally announced that they were signing Rousey and building a women’s bantamweight division for her to rule over. The battle between her growing fame and White’s stubborn skepticism was a mismatch, and in her first U.F.C. fight, which she won with yet another arm-bar submission, Rousey was the main attraction on a successful pay-per-view card. By drafting her as a coach for “The Ultimate Fighter,” the company hoped to increase her exposure, while also underscoring its commitment to women fighters: for the first time, the contestants were divided evenly between women and men, competing for two separate U.F.C. contracts.
“The Ultimate Fighter” proved to be a defining moment for Rousey, although not the way she or the U.F.C. might have imagined. The bad feelings began in the first episode, when the opposing coach suffered an injury and producers decided not to tell Rousey; instead, they lured her to the gym, where the new coach—Tate—was waiting, with a cold smile. For a moment, Rousey thought that Tate was replacing her, and even after she learned the truth she was angry about the setup. “I was directly lied to for the sake of them getting some juicy footage,” she says now. The show depicted Rousey in one extended sulk, finding new ways to clash with Tate and her team in every episode. Wrestling fans talk about the “heel turn,” the moment when a fan favorite is revealed to be a villain, and for Rousey “The Ultimate Fighter” functioned as her heel turn. Especially in the context of a rather inane reality show, her unstinting intensity made her seem slightly scary. When Rousey beat Tate in a rock-climbing contest, she celebrated by extending a middle finger and shouting, “Fuck you, bitch!” And when Baszler, one of her team’s top-ranked fighters, lost her first match, Rousey was inconsolable. “I fucking failed today,” she said, sobbing. Then, instantly, her mood changed and she accused Tate of taking pleasure in Baszler’s disappointment. “She’s going to pay for every fucking smile she smirks today,” Rousey said, scowling through tears. Can you blame those of us who paid our sixty dollars, two months later, to watch it happen?
When Rousey talks about her reputation, she often uses the language of professional wrestling, as if her heel turn were merely a ploy to drum up interest. “If you’re cheering and the person next to you is booing, you’re going to cheer louder,” she says. “I love that. I love creating conflict within the audience.” But at her most compelling she sounds less like a sly provocateur and more like a sensitive soul, deeply offended by those she feels have wronged her. During her judo days, crowds usually rooted against her, maybe just because she was an American, in a sport typically dominated by Asians and Europeans. “I’ve been booed in over thirty countries,” she says, and some part of her still seems surprised, and perhaps a little hurt, that stardom hasn’t eliminated this phenomenon.
Great fighters are supposed to be at once humble athletes, who fight for sport, and fearsome warriors, who fight for cause. Rousey excels at making each match feel like a grudge match, even if her only grudge is with the recalcitrant fans who still won’t cheer for her. A number of top U.F.C. stars have similarly complex relationships with their paying customers. Jon (Bones) Jones, a dazzling light heavyweight, may be the most talented and dominant male fighter in the sport, but some find him arrogant and petulant; CagePotato has branded him “catty” and compared him to “a child.” Even so, as Rousey built her public persona, she faced hurdles that her male counterparts surely didn’t. When she and Tate exchanged insults in 2012, each implied that the other didn’t belong in the cage, as if conscious of the discomfiting possibility that fans might not take either of them seriously. And although Georges St. Pierre, the former champion from Canada, has plenty of fans who view him as a heartthrob, his beauty isn’t typically discussed as an essential part of his career. There is now, thanks to Rousey, a space for women in the U.F.C., but it’s a narrow space; even the woman who created it doesn’t quite fit.
One hope is that, as the women’s division expands, the novelty of seeing women in the cage will fade. The U.F.C. recently added a second women’s division—strawweight, with a limit of a hundred and fifteen pounds—in response to the growing number of female fighters and fans. And Rousey’s success has buoyed the success of Invicta, an upstart all-female promotion, which may help fans appreciate women’s M.M.A. on its own terms, much the way tennis fans find different things to love in the men’s and women’s games. Marina Shafir—one of Rousey’s roommates, a fellow-judoka turned M.M.A. fighter—says that Rousey’s elegant, protean grappling style is a good example of the difference between men’s and women’s styles. “She’s got this weird shoulder-neck flexibility thing that you would never see out of a guy,” Shafir says. White’s verdict is just as enthusiastic, though considerably less nuanced. “Women are crazier than we are,” he says. “They fight, man.”
U.F.C. events are neatly stage-managed, with video introductions for each of the main fighters, and no long waits between fights. In Las Vegas, Patrick Cummins, the underdog who had given up a life of coffee, strutted into the cage looking relaxed and confident. Daniel Cormier knocked him down and kept knocking, while Cummins crawled around seeking safe harbor, which was eventually provided by the referee. He had lost in a washout, but he had made a name for himself and a small amount of money: his announced payday was eight thousand dollars. When the ring was cleared, it was time for video introductions. Joe Rogan, the commentator, cast Rousey once more as the heel. “Ronda Rousey plays for keeps,” he intoned. “She’s not trying to earn P.R. points. She’s not trying to get you to like her.” But as she began her walk to the ring no dislike was audible. Surely no one who chooses to spend a Saturday night at the fights can be unhappy to see Rousey, in a black hooded sweatshirt, striding purposefully toward the cage, as Joan Jett’s “Bad Reputation” plays over the P.A.
After weeks of hearing every M.M.A. analyst explain why Rousey would win, it was slightly startling, once the fight began, to be reminded that its outcome hadn’t actually been determined yet. The two fighters drew close, and McMann swung her right fist into Rousey’s left temple. Rousey stiffened, more annoyed than afraid, but McMann kept swinging and kept connecting. From a table next to the cage, Rogan was shouting, “She got tagged!” Rousey pushed McMann back into the fence, and they grappled for position. Rousey looked stronger, but she also looked as if she were trying to figure out what to do with her strength—she fights so hotly that she can sometimes seem frantic, although her moves tend to be the result of cool analysis. She planted her left leg for a judo throw, trying to flip McMann onto the mat, and McMann blocked it—she was said to have the best takedown defense of any opponent Rousey had faced. But this was a trap: now McMann was thinking more about preventing being taken down and less about Rousey’s left knee, which happened to be plunging toward her liver. The moment Rousey connected, McMann collapsed on all fours, and the referee rushed over to declare her defenseless and award Rousey the victory. Rousey never shows self-doubt, but you can detect a trace of it in the joy and disbelief that transform her face after she wins. As the crowd began to boo, she took out her mouthguard and beamed.
When the arena had cleared, Rousey disappeared to a nearby hotel lounge with De Mars and her team, where she ate her traditional post-fight feast of hot wings with blue-cheese dip. Then, for the first time in nearly a year, she took a vacation, going to Costa Rica with Brendan Schaub, a genial—and much less prominent—U.F.C. heavyweight who was her boyfriend at the time. But within a few weeks Rousey was starting to miss her old training routine, so she asked to fight again, and a match was scheduled for July 5th. She was assigned Alexis Davis, who was a sturdy opponent—or might have been, against somebody else. Rousey punched her in the head, kneed her in the gut, threw her onto the mat, and punched her nine times in the face before the referee intervened. The match lasted sixteen seconds, although longer for Davis: dazed and disoriented, she continued to grapple with the referee until he managed to convince her that the fight was over.
Part of the problem with being a dominant champion, like Rousey, is that fans are never satisfied with mere dominance. We want to see a great fighter tested and possibly hurt—at which point we reserve the right to start muttering that the great fighter might not have been so great after all. In order to keep the attention of a restless audience, Rousey needs to find another Rousey. She has talked about wanting to lure Carano, her old hero, out of retirement, which would be a popular match, but likely a brutal one: nothing in Carano’s résumé suggests that she could keep pace with Rousey, especially after five years away. The fight most fans want is Rousey versus Cyborg, although there are some obstacles. Two and a half years ago, Cyborg tested positive for a steroid called stanozolol, and was suspended for a year; skeptical fans thought they had found an explanation for her enviably well-defined musculature. (Cyborg says she used the substance unwittingly, as part of her effort to cut weight, and she points out that she hasn’t failed any other drug tests.) In M.M.A., fighters are typically allowed to return after a banned-substance suspension, but Rousey argues that Cyborg’s positive test should be permanently disqualifying.
“In a perfect world, she wouldn’t have been taking all those steroids and hormones for so many years that she ceased to be a woman anymore,” Rousey said one afternoon, when Cyborg’s name was mentioned—she was driving back to the gym from a nearby juice bar, and her sunny mood suddenly darkened. “In a perfect world, she would be a girl and not an it.” This sounded more like passionate indignation than like idle pre-fight trash talk. Beneath Rousey’s anti-drug message, you could also hear echoes of the old insistence that women fighters take pains to be scrupulously feminine, lest the spectre of manliness turn the fledgling sport into a freak show.
Rousey is struggling to make women’s M.M.A. more established, although in a sense her own struggle has already been won. Last week, ESPN named her the female athlete of the year. On the U.F.C.’s list of its best fighters, she ranks No. 9—she is the only woman on the list, and by just about any measure she is a bigger name than the eight men ahead of her. The flyweight Demetrious (Mighty Mouse) Johnson, No. 4, is known for his dazzling versatility and his quick feet, but he is hardly a celebrity. In fact, he has recently talked about trying to break into Hollywood—hoping, he admits, to follow the trail blazed by Rousey.
One day, the same qualities that make her controversial within M.M.A.—her unwillingness to be ignored, her ferocity, her confidence, her gender—may help her to leave it behind. Not long after she returned to Los Angeles, she spent a few weeks shooting her third acting role: a part in “Entourage,” the movie based on the HBO series. When she read the script, Rousey was pleased to see that she hadn’t been cast for her fighting. The director, Doug Ellin, says he had never seen her act when he cast her, and although he had watched her matches, he was more taken by her demonstrative and engaging performances in interviews. “She’s not playing a tough-guy character in this—she’s playing the nice side of her,” he says. “People who aren’t fight fans who watch this will go, ‘Wait a second—she’s a fighter? I don’t get it.’ ”
If fans once worried that Rousey didn’t really belong in the U.F.C., now they worry that she might not stay. Carano, for instance, devoted herself to acting after her 2009 defeat. (She recently starred in an unpretentious kidnapping movie called “In the Blood,” playing, essentially, Liam Neeson.) Rousey says that she considered retirement after her traumatic experience with reality television. “I figured that if people are going to treat me like that then they didn’t deserve to work with me,” she says. Her agent, Brad Slater, also represents Dwayne (The Rock) Johnson, the former professional wrestler who is now one of Hollywood’s most reliable stars, and also one of Rousey’s role models. Slater is working to put together her first starring role, in an adaptation of “The Athena Project,” a Brad Thor novel about a pack of glamorous but lethal female counterterrorism agents. Compared with the cramped and punishing world of M.M.A., Hollywood can seem relatively civilized. Rousey wasn’t nervous on the “Entourage” set. “It’s not like I could die if I say it wrong,” she says.
But she has been feeling more excited about M.M.A. lately, and she has been enthusiastically helping the other Horsewomen train. On a recent afternoon, she worked with one of them, a relatively inexperienced fighter named Jessamyn Duke, to prepare for an upcoming bout. She had stitches in her right hand, so she was fighting one-handed, throwing only left hooks. They put on boxing gloves and headgear, and for three rounds Rousey buffeted Duke. By the end, Duke was red-faced and teary, heaving from exhaustion and frustration. Rousey frowned at her. “Don’t show it,” she shouted, repeating a command she has heard, and ignored, all her life. ♦
