America loves dominance.
To paraphrase one of the UFC’s most irritating catchphrases—it’s in our DNA.
Sure, we’ll shell out $10 to cheer the perfect underdog story at a weekend matinee or wax nostalgic over a 30-for-30 documentary championing the little guy, but in real life we want winners.
We prefer Mike Tyson to Rocky Balboa, the New York Yankees to the Bad News Bears and Michael Jordan to Jimmy Chitwood. Every metric we have—from television ratings to merchandise sales—tells us this is true.
In the case of UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey, however, you have to wonder if there’s an upper limit to how much dominance mainstream America can stomach without it growing stale.
Rousey’s roughshod run through the rest of the best 135-pound women on the planet took another impressive, but predictable, step on Saturday when she knocked out Bethe Correia in 34 seconds at UFC 190.
The win boosted her overall record to 12-0—including 11 first-round finishes and nine victories that lasted less than a minute.
It also dovetailed with Rousey’s ascendance to pop culture superstardom.
Despite the fact Correia shaped up as the least dangerous opponent of her career, prefight coverage included largely fawning pieces about Rousey from media heavy-hitters like ESPN, the New York Times and Time Magazine.
In May, Sports Illustrated’s Jon Wertheim called her the world’s most dominant athlete. As of Monday afternoon, the Worldwide Leader still had her in heavy rotation on television and radio. This week we also learned Rousey will soon produce and star in a biopic about her own life.
It will be a little while before we get final, specific estimates on UFC 190’s success, but the web traffic from the fight has been off the charts, and the pay-per-view buy rate is expected to be, too:
It’s rapidly starting to seem as if Rousey is the perfect combat sports star for 2015—a larger-than-life, tough-talking personality whose fights typically last about as long as an Instagram video.
She’s also a woman dominating in a highly male-centric sport, which never hurts when you’re trying to bring platforms like Cosmopolitan, Rolling Stone and Esquire under the tent.
Her fights thus far have been terrible mismatches, and she’s won them all in fitting fashion. Celebrities have taken a shine to her, and now she too is becoming some version of a celebrity.
Whether the fighter and her bosses at the UFC want to admit it, however, last weekend’s victory over Correia left Rousey at an interesting promotional crossroads.
Just as her career trajectory reaches its apex, matchmakers seem unable to find her a competitive fight. The only woman in the known world who might give her one is Invicta FC featherweight champion Cris “Cyborg” Justino, but that matchup doesn’t appear anywhere close to happening.
Meanwhile, top in-house contender Holly Holm needs more time to find her legs inside the Octagon or else she’ll surely suffer the same fate as Rousey’s previous foes.
The end result is that five fights and two-and-a-half years into her Octagon run, Rousey has all but cleaned out her weight class. Her next appearance is scheduled to be a third meeting with arch nemesis Miesha Tate, whom Rousey has already handily defeated twice.
She and Tate will no doubt be good for some quality prefight trash talk, but nobody expects the outcome to be any different.
So, you see the multimillion-dollar dilemma facing the UFC: Rousey has caught the attention of the masses, but can she keep it if she merely goes on being a self-fulfilling prophecy?
At least inside the MMA community there are fears people may tire of her fights, which cost $60 but mostly last less than a minute. It’s also a real possibility the UFC might just run out of fresh bodies to feed her.
Correia came in as the UFC’s No. 5-ranked bantamweight but was only deemed fit as an opponent because Rousey had already trounced the women numbered 1-4. Now that Correia has joined her list of victims, the champ holds victories over seven of the fighters in the 135-pound Top 10.
Normally, when a UFC champion cleans out his or her division, there are calls for a move up in weight so the titleholder can face new challenges. With Rousey, there’s nowhere left for her to go. She’s already defeated the best competition the fight company can find her, and she’s done it with the ease of Barry Bonds ripping a few dingers at a kid’s T-ball game.
And look, the effortlessness of her victories shouldn’t be a surprise. Rousey is the best athlete in a very shallow weight class. She posses far and away the most impressive amateur accolades there, too. Take her status as a child judo prodigy, her physical size, strength, speed and personal ruthlessness, and it’s no wonder her peers can’t keep up with her.
Put it another way: Rousey is a lifelong judoka and world-class competitor who won a bronze medal at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Correia? She reportedly took up MMA in 2011 as a way to lose weight.
When those two people fought in a cage last weekend, who did we really expect to win?
Women’s MMA has only been a staple in the UFC since the beginning of 2013 and is still very much in its developmental phase. In its present state, it’s highly unlikely a new and dangerous opponent for Rousey will just appear out of thin air.
If that’s the case, then our immediate choices are: Cyborg? Or the field?
So far, it looks like the field will win the day, and that raises very real questions about whether Rousey’s lack of competition will become a problem.
For some time, the UFC has tried to paint her as MMA’s answer to Tyson. It’s a shrewd strategy, likely designed to condition the public to expect women’s MMA to go on being Rousey and a collection of random opponents.
It’s also a fairly new marketing ploy for the UFC, where—unlike boxing—compelling matchups have always been the rule. We don’t know if the Rousey-as-Tyson gambit will hold up long-term. We don’t know if her particular brand of ferocity will have the same kind of staying power.
Despite the outcome of the Correia fight, Rousey is primarily known as a grappler, not a fearsome knockout artist. It remains to be seen if she can sustain her status as a media darling if she merely continues to pick the bones of an already-depleted UFC roster.
The organization’s best hope, of course, is that all this worrying exists only inside the MMA bubble.
Rousey’s notoriety has reached the point where the UFC is no longer really trying to sell her fights to actual fight fans. The casual spectators who now make up the most potent portion of her fanbase may not even care if her competition is legitimate or not. Heck, they might not even notice.
There are some early indications this could be true:
It’s also possible a lack of real opposition could stunt Rousey’s mainstream appeal.
It’s obvious she has seized the attention of top tastemakers for now. She’s the UFC’s ultimate overdog story, and so far people are buying into it without asking too many tough questions.
But for how long? At some point, does the PPV-buying public start to ask what exactly it’s watching? And whether what it’s watching is worth the money?
None of this is Rousey’s fault, obviously. The only thing she can do is beat the opponents who are put in front of her, and so far she’s done that better than almost anyone we’ve seen before.
Perhaps that’s the trouble.
Conventional sports wisdom says there’s no such thing as being too dominant, but Rousey appears deadest on testing that theory.
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