During the Mauricio Rua vs. Antonio Rogerio Nogueira fight last Saturday night, I received a text message from my mother.
Now, I live in Las Vegas. She still lives in my old hometown outside of Houston. It was after midnight central time, which is also long past my mom’s bedtime. So you can imagine my surprise when my phone dinged and I saw she’d sent a message.
Here is what she wanted to know: Had Ronda Rousey fought yet? Did she win?
My mom hates fighting. She used to make sporadic attempts to watch just because she wanted to be supportive of my job. But more often than not, she ended up doing the thing where you cover your eyes with your hand, watching only occasionally through the cracks in your fingers.
She’s not a fan. She’s like a lot of people in that way. Fighting isn’t for everyone, no matter what Dana White says about it being part of our DNA.
But my mom likes Ronda. And she wanted to know if the fight was over and if Ronda had won as quickly as she always does.
I told her the fight hadn’t happened yet, and she made me promise to text her and tell her what happened. After Rousey crushed Bethe Correia in 34 seconds, I pinged her to let her know. She was happy.
It is a moment like this, a conversation with a total non-fan of mixed martial arts, that shows just how transcendent Rousey has become. To hardcore MMA fans, she is not the biggest star in the sport. That honor probably still belongs to Conor McGregor.
But in terms of sheer star power and ability to drawn in casual fans? There is nobody even on Rousey‘s level. And to tell you the truth, there never has been.
She is the single biggest mainstream mixed martial arts star the sport has ever seen. And she’s only getting bigger.
Not even Brock Lesnar, the biggest drawing card in UFC history, can match Rousey‘s broad appeal. Lesnar brought a new audience to the UFC that had never before watched on a regular basis: professional wrestling fans. They tuned in by the millions, and some of them stuck around to become fans of the sport.
But Rousey goes far beyond just MMA fans and wrestling fans. She appeals to sports fans, to be sure. But she has also reached a unique place where her fights are must-see events for people who never watch the UFC. Like Floyd Mayweather Jr., Rousey reaches demographics that were once considered impossible for mixed martial arts to penetrate.
On Saturday night, I arrived at my favorite sports bar to watch the fight. I got there two hours early, figuring that would be plenty of time to grab an empty table and settle in for the long haul. And usually, that’s the case.
Not on this night. Two hours before the pay-per-view began, every table in the bar was taken, and all of them were there to watch the fight. My name was first on the waiting list; it would be five hours before my name was called. By that point, the wait list had over 70 names on it. At the Buffalo Wild Wings around the corner, there was a line stretching more than 30 people long snaking out the front door and around the side of the building.
And one look at the makeup of these crowds tells you all you need to know about Rousey‘s impact. There were couples in their 60s. Young crowds of 20-somethings. Mothers and their teenage daughters. All were waiting in the hopes of finding a comfortable place to watch the fight.
Over the weekend, there were 6.3 million Google searches for terms relating to UFC 190. By comparison, UFC 189 searches totaled 1.2 million. Rousey added 1.4 million followers to her Instagram account in three days. And while we may never know exactly how many pay-per-view buys this one did, one thing is for certain: It was massive.
In the MMA community, we tend to view UFC events by the overall perceived strength of the card. When we see a weak card—as UFC 190 as a whole clearly was—we often believe it won’t do very good numbers. And when Rousey wins short, dominant fights the way she does, we often wonder if people will continue to tune in. Why pay $60 when the fight will be over in 30 seconds?
But the truth is that the kind of fans Rousey brings to the table do not care about the quality of a fight card. They don’t care if the event features four Brazilian fighters nobody has ever heard of or if Shogun or the Nogueira brothers are past their prime.
What they care about is Ronda Rousey. That’s it. Nothing else matters. They tune in to see Rousey fight, and they tune in because they have a pretty clear idea the fight will be short and violent. They don’t care about anything else that happens on the card; they tune in because there’s a great chance Rousey will maul someone, and that’s what they want to see.
And it has become increasingly clear that the desire to see Rousey do her thing has stretched far beyond what we once considered to be the boundaries of MMA. We talk so often of fighters breaking through into the mainstream, but I do not believe it has truly ever happened until now.
Not in the way Rousey has, anyway.
She is far and away the biggest star in the history of mixed martial arts, and her legend is still growing.
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