The testosterone replacement therapy era ended swiftly and unexpectedly on Thursday, with all the fireworks of a subdued but unanimous vote by the Nevada State Athletic Commission.
As the first state regulatory body to ban TRT outright for combat sport…
The testosterone replacement therapy era ended swiftly and unexpectedly on Thursday, with all the fireworks of a subdued but unanimous vote by the Nevada State Athletic Commission.
As the first state regulatory body to ban TRT outright for combat sports, the NSAC reaffirmed its position as the nation’s most influential and forward-thinking athletic commission. Minutes later, the UFC joined the party by announcing it will follow Nevada’s lead and disallow TRT at shows where it does its own oversight and drug testing.
And thus, the decisive blow was finally struck in what for years has been MMA’s most high-profile performance-enhancing-drugs crisis.
As former baseball play-by-play man Jack Buck might say: Go crazy, folks, go crazy.
Clearly, the sport’s battle with PEDs is far from over. There is still a marked need for better, more thorough overall testing, and it remains to be seen how quickly other states will join Nevada in banning TRT. Even still, this must be regarded as a great day for MMA and a huge step toward a cleaner industry.
TRT was listed second-to-last on the NSAC’s 27-item agenda on Thursday and observers expected its discussion would focus merely on the commission’s standard for approving therapeutic-use exemptions. Instead, in a whirlwind dialogue and vote, the body banned TRT use entirely.
In the moments that followed, MMA social-media circles exploded in excited relief. The sport’s long national nightmare, it seemed, was on the verge of a happy ending.
UFC officials attending the meeting left hastily without talking to reporters, but minutes later, company president Dana White—who’s waffled on TRT over the years—reportedly texted ESPN’s Brett Okamoto to say he fully supported the move.
“(I) couldn’t wait for that garbage to go away,” White told MMA Fighting’s Ariel Helwani a bit later, as the UFC released a statement urging other state athletic commissions to also ban TRT.
It was hard not to notice a subtle sense of irony on the day, as the NSAC voted to eliminate testosterone use at the same meeting where it approved the UFC’s request to hold a pay-per-view event at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on May 24.
It is thought that show will be UFC 173 and feature the middleweight title bout between Chris Weidman and Vitor Belfort.
Belfort became the poster boy for TRT use during 2013, winning three straight fights via head-kick knockout while seeming to recapture the speed and fearsome power of his 19-year-old self.
As a fighter who’d been caught using steroids in Nevada in 2006, Belfort’s TRT usage raised suspicions among fans and media, especially when he claimed he couldn’t remember when he started the controversial treatment or the name of the doctor who recommended it.
It had been assumed that Belfort would apply for a TUE in Nevada leading up to his clash with Weidman. No word yet on what the 36-year-old “Phenom” will do now.
The NSAC vote was also notable because it came just two days after an ESPN Outside the Linesreport indicated that the mainstream media had finally noticed MMA’s massive TRT-related black eye.
The collaboration of ESPN investigative reporter Mike Fish and longtime fight journalist Josh Gross was a painstakingly comprehensive look at TRT in MMA. While the report was likely an eye-opener for the uninitiated, for people already familiar with the story, it was simply the last nail in the TRT coffin.
In its wake, it was no longer possible to go on blathering about “normal” hormone levels or “hypogonadism” without looking like a fool.
Perhaps NSAC members read the series of stories before casting their historic vote. Perhaps not. Whatever the reason, kudos to the “fight capital of the world” for finally doing the right thing on behalf of clean fighters, dedicated fans and the good name of MMA as a whole.
This decision by the NSAC and UFC isn’t a magic elixir that will cure all (or even most) PED use in MMA. State commissions will conceivably need to work even harder now to catch drug cheats. Indeed, Nevada commission members admitted part of their reasoning for banning TRT was that they didn’t have the budget to track it properly.
Make no mistake, though, this is a leap in the right direction. As other major sports work feverishly to cleanse themselves of PEDs, MMA will no longer appear complicit in aiding and abetting those who take chemical-induced shortcuts.
The loophole is now closed and those MMA fighters who continue to look for a leg up from science will have to do it outside the rules.
When the final scorecards were revealed on Sunday in Gilbert Melendez’s arduous contract negotiation with the UFC, the results were a clear-cut unanimous-decision victory for the former Strikeforce lightweight champion.
It was a monumental upset …
When the final scorecards were revealed on Sunday in Gilbert Melendez’s arduous contract negotiation with the UFC, the results were a clear-cut unanimous-decision victory for the former Strikeforce lightweight champion.
It was a monumental upset that will arguably go down as the biggest win of Melendez’s MMA career.
It’s not every day that a lowly fighter takes up his slingshot against the world’s largest and most litigious MMA company and comes out on top. Perhaps we must now begin to regard Melendez not only as one of the 155-pound division’s best scrappers but one of its most accomplished negotiators as well.
When the smokescreen of his threat to decamp for Bellator finally cleared, Melendez appeared to get everything he wanted from the UFC, including what we can only assume were a boatload of concessions.
There were some fans who already believed Melendez should be the UFC lightweight champion, after he came out on the wrong end of another of Benson Henderson’s Harry Houdini escape acts in April, 2013.
Now at least he’ll be paid like it.
Melendez’s new deal could make him one of the sport’s best-compensated athletes. According to MMA Fighting.com’s Shaun Al-Shatti, the contract stipulates that 75 percent of the fighter’s future bouts must be contested on pay-per-view and Melendez will receive “(PPV) income” regardless of his placement on an individual card.
Additionally, those kickbacks that he will be paid on PPV points will trigger at a lower minimum buyrate than “for any contract in UFC history.”
Oh yeah, and he’ll also star opposite Anthony Pettis as a coach on Season 20 of The Ultimate Fighter in advance of a 155-pound title fight between the two later this year.
If you’re scoring at home, that casts Melendez a world away from where he was just a month ago, when reports swirled via MMA Fighting that he’d turned down a fight against up-and-comer Khabib Nurmagomedov. If any of that cloud still hangs over his reputation, Melendez will just have to light his way by burning $100 bills.
Even as recently as Feb. 12, things didn’t look like they would end quite this rosy for “El Nino.”
As initial talks between Melendez and the UFC stalled, company president Dana White passed along the idea that the fighter “better start looking elsewhere,” on an episode of UFC Tonight, via MMAFighting.
“I’m done,” White reportedly told Ariel Helwani. “It’s not going well. I couldn’t care less about it anymore. I like Gilbert Melendez, I don’t like his management.”
The message was clear, and the stakes were unmistakably high for Melendez. When a fighter gets crossways with the UFC, things rarely come out in his or her favor. The MMA giant is used to having things its own way, both with its employees and how it’s portrayed inside the cage of public opinion.
That’s why—unless you’re the kind of person who roots for Verizon or Time Warner—it was easy to cheer Melendez on Feb. 14, when he called the UFC’s bluff and agreed to terms on a new deal with BellatorMMA.
Crossing the aisle to Bellator would have been an ostentatious move from any fighter, but it was especially bold from a guy who spent a dozen years just trying to get into the UFC.
For him to put his career on the line in order to get paid what he felt he deserved showed tremendous courage and also a special brand of devil-may-care attitude. He countered the UFC’s message with one of his own: He was willing to go back to semi-obscurity to get a fair shake.
Thank goodness it didn’t come to that.
In the end, UFC brass exercised their matching rights, tacitly admitting they didn’t want to let a fighter of his caliber waltz out the door in his prime. And the UFC certainly didn’t want him bolstering Bellator’s best weight class with potential PPV-worthy matchups against Eddie Alvarez and Michael Chandler.
After all, aside from the nifty eight-sided branding, the only thing that actually separates the UFC from its competition is the notion that it has the best fighters and puts on the most relevant fights.
Even in a sport where—in the deafening absence of collective bargaining—the scales almost always tip away from labor and toward capital, it seems the UFC needed Melendez as badly as he needed the fight company.
His re-signing finally gives some direction to a lightweight division that had grown stagnant with Pettis’ injury and No. 1 contender T.J. Grant’s recovery from a concussion. Sure, that direction will take awhile to play out—Melendez and Pettis will spend most of 2014 on the shelf—but knowing, as they say, is half the battle.
Melendez told MMA Junkie’s Ben Fowlkes when he got the call from UFC CEO Lorenzo Fertitta—the guy you deal with when you fall out with White—that the UFC was going to match Bellator’s offer, he had to put the casino magnate on mute so he could celebrate.
“I was just smiling and yelling and dancing around like a little girl,” Melendez said. “I was just really excited.”
Alongside his Strikeforce title, his .880 winning percentage and his epic trilogy with Josh Thomson, add one more accolade to Melendez’s career: He’s that rare breed of fighter who went head-to-head with the UFC and ended up celebrating.
If there’s a downside here at all for him, it’s that the new No. 1 contender for the UFC lightweight title is still officially just 1-1 in the Octagon.
Now that he’s paid, it’s time for him to go win some fights.
If social media is to be believed, Ronda Rousey celebrated Saturday’s win over Sara McMann at UFC 170 by going out for chicken wings.
Following back-to-back training camps, dueling promotional efforts and a pair of championship fights within 56 d…
If social media is to be believed, Ronda Rousey celebrated Saturday’s win over Sara McMann at UFC 170 by going out for chicken wings.
Following back-to-back training camps, dueling promotional efforts and a pair of championship fights within 56 days of each other, it looks like she wanted to get that vacation started as soon as possible.
Current estimates say we won’t see her in the Octagon again for six or seven months, though she hints she could be ready to go back to work before that.
While she’s away, Rousey’s promoters and the division she rules without mirth or mercy will have some work to do.
Let’s face it, for the UFC, Ronda on vacation is essentially a trial run for Life Without Ronda. During her absence, the company not only needs to build toward her return, but also solidify its women’s MMA product for the day its biggest star leaves for good.
Here are five things the UFC should do as Rousey is out making movies…
Perhaps the worst thing about the controversial ending to UFC 170 is there will be no easy fix.
After back-to-back fight camps and a 56-day turnaround between defenses of her UFC women’s bantamweight title, Ronda Rousey already had a vacatio…
Perhaps the worst thing about the controversial ending to UFC 170 is there will be no easy fix.
After back-to-back fight camps and a 56-day turnaround between defenses of her UFC women’s bantamweight title, Ronda Rousey already had a vacation scheduled following Saturday’s bout against Sara McMann.
That means regardless of what you thought of referee Herb Dean’s stoppage of the main event after one minute and six seconds, it’ll be a while before we see Rousey in the Octagon again.
She’s got a couple of movies that need filming, and even though she says she’s targeting late summer for a possible return, this wasn’t quite the triumphant note she hoped to strike with her exit.
Nor was it the conclusive outcome fans hoped to see.
For that matter, it wasn‘t the square-deal shot at the 135-pound championship that McMann had been training for either.
Yes, the challenger was obviously hurt when Rousey muscled her against the cage early in the first and dropped her with a hard knee to the midsection, but she seemed to be scrambling back to her feet when Dean stepped in to halfheartedly wave things off.
By the time the two fighters were fully separated, McMann was up on her knees, looking at Dean with that expression we’ve seen a thousand times before—the shock and frustration already bottoming out into disappointment.
By now, we know the drill, even if McMannwouldn’t allow herself to criticize the referee’s call in the aftermath.
“I heard (Dean’s) voice, and I immediately tried to get back up,” she told MMAJunkie’s Matt Erickson and DannStupp after the fight. “I’m not going to blame a referee for something I feel like I should be able to control. I should get up quicker. If you want to win fights, you just have to do it, regardless of what’s going on.”
The stoppage short-circuited what was shaping up to be an interesting bout, as McMann unloaded some heavy punches on Rousey during their early exchanges. Even after the champion succeeded in bullying her against the chain link, McMann thwarted early attempts at takedowns.
She had not taken a significant blow to the head, nor did she seem in danger of being injured or hurt in any lasting way when Dean jumped in.
It’s easy to dismiss the controversy by saying the referee only saved McMann from further damage—nine times out of 10, that’s true in these situations—but in this instance, it’s impossible to say what was about to happen.
Was Rousey about to deal the prone McMann some brain-rattling punches? Maybe.
Or was the Olympic silver medalist in women’s wrestling about to grab one of the champion’s legs and dump her on her keister? That also seemed possible.
Now we’ll never know.
Her undefeated record spoiled without a definitive outcome, McMann will simply have to return to the pack of bantamweight contenders. She’ll have to work her way back to the top with another fight or two.
Under different circumstances, she might have been able to agitate—justifiably—for an immediate rematch, but with Rousey already packed for a few months on holiday, there’s not much point in McMann making a stink.
People have instantly segued to speculating about a next opponent for the champion—debating the merits of Cat Zingano, Alexis Davis and unsigned threats like Cristiane “Cyborg” Justino and Holly Holm.
Memory is not our strong suit in this sport, and by the time Rousey comes back from her break, we’ll likely have moved on from the notion that McMann might’ve been her most dangerous foe.
This, even though Saturday night’s bout didn’t completely prove otherwise. Not really.
Perhaps because Rousey is already scheduled for time away, UFC president Dana White came to the post-fight press conference fully ready to defend Dean and the stoppage. The company line seems to be that there was no problem with the outcome of this fight.
“(McMann) went down to her knees, and she turned her head the other way,” White said during the presser. “Could Herb have let her take some shots to the face? Definitely. But when the fight happened and I saw it, I said, ‘Oh man,’ … (but) when I watched the replay, I thought it was a good stoppage.”
Still, it was hard not to be dissatisfied with this one.
The pay-per-view portion of UFC 170 began with a trio of solid scraps, but after Daniel Cormier’s co-main event fight against Patrick Cummins played out just like the oddsmakers told us it would, it felt like the event needed a pick-me-up.
Instead, all it got was another questionable call from the suddenly shaky Dean, who has long been regarded as one of MMA‘s most trustworthy referees.
If Rousey was to win, it would’ve been nice to see her do so in dominating—or at least inarguable—fashion. That would’ve sent UFC 170 out with a highlight and stoked the fires for her return against whomever the UFC positions as her next foe.
If McMann was going to lose, the minimum we owed her was a clear-cut verdict. At least then it wouldn’t seem like the 33-year-old owner of one of MMA’s most compelling personal stories had spent all that time training and doing the media rounds for nothing.
One of these women deserved to have her moment on top of the world. By simple virtue of being there, the other had earned the right to know she was beaten by the best.
When the referee jumped the gun, nobody got what they wanted and now it’ll be a good long time before anyone gets a second chance.
Ronda Rousey is getting a massage.
It’s Wednesday afternoon in Glendale, Calif., 11 days before she’ll defend her UFC women’s bantamweight championship against Sara McMann at UFC 170, and Rousey is due for a short break.
All week, rep…
It’s Wednesday afternoon in Glendale, Calif., 11 days before she’ll defend her UFC women’s bantamweight championship against Sara McMann at UFC 170, and Rousey is due for a short break.
All week, reporters and camera crews have been in her gym just outside Los Angeles, peppering her with questions about her future as the face of mixed martial arts, about her budding movie career and, most notably, about McMann.
This physical therapy session at the end of the day is supposed to be her time to relax, but instead she is using it to finish up a few final phone interviews. If the squeals coming from her end of the line are any indication, the massage is also its own special kind of torture.
“They’re being mean to me right now,” she says.
Her bout against McMann on Feb. 22 will mark the first time two Olympic medalists have met inside the Octagon, and the mainstream media’s attention is duly piqued.
The spotlight is bright whenever Rousey fights, but considering their shared Olympic backgrounds—McMann won a silver medal in wrestling in 2004, Rousey a bronze in judo in 2008—the press and the UFC public relations machine are working overtime to fashion McMann as the champ’s most dangerous opponent yet.
And so there are questions.
Everyone wants to know where Rousey’s head is as she prepares to defend her 135-pound title for the third time. They want to know how she’s feeling after a lightning-fast, 56-day turnaround from her last fight, an emotional victory over archrival Miesha Tate. They want to know how she’s preparing for McMann as rumors of a handful of new movie roles simultaneously swirl around her.
This has been her life since the UFC named her its first female champion 14 months ago—one part luxury, two parts tedious, grueling work.
Now that she’s comfortably ensconced as the best female fighter in the world, the Ronda Rousey show never stops. She’s been living it so fast and so hard, it doesn’t even seem weird to her anymore.
“If anything it’s starting to feel normal,” she says. “Even before, when I wasn’t getting as much media attention for my fights, I was doing just as much work. I was just doing it on my own. I was spending hours a day on social media. I was trying to do every single interview I could—if it was somebody’s blog or some random Joe’s podcast. I was spending just as much time doing it, I just wasn’t reaching as many people.”
***
In just over a year with the company Rousey has done more than most of her male counterparts will do in their entire careers.
Inside the cage, she’s dominated the competition with a ferocity she honed as an Olympic judoka, finishing all eight of her career fights with the same armbar submission. Her opponents all know it’s coming, and they still can’t stop it. Only one (Tate) has lasted longer than a single round.
Outside the Octagon, Rousey has been an even bigger success, landing on the cover of Maxim and ESPN the Magazine, appearing in commercials, spending a season coaching on the UFC’s The Ultimate Fighter reality show and securing parts in mega-movie franchises like The Expendables 3 and the still unreleased Fast & Furious 7.
Her unique mix of viciousness and good looks makes her UFC promoters visibly giddy. Before Rousey, they had no interest in women’s fighting. With her, it’s arguably the organization’s fastest growing asset.
“I’m going to go out and say she’s the biggest star we’ve ever had…,” said UFC President Dana White, with his characteristic flare, via Yahoo Sports. “This chick does two movies back-to-back, fights, comes back in (expletive) training camp, films The Ultimate Fighter, (expletive) does all these appearances and all this other (expletive). She’s a (expletive) rock star.”
The ride has not come without a few hiccups. Many fans found her turn on The Ultimate Fighter grating and her unabashed hatred for Tate—think profane tirades interrupted only by middle fingers—off-putting.
In January 2013, she drew extensive heat for tweeting a link to what she called an “extremely interesting, must watch” video, which alleged the Sandy Hook school shooting was a staged government conspiracy.
She later deleted the tweet, and her manager told MMAJunkie.com she meant “no disrespect” by linking to the video.
“It’s definitely not easy,” she says now, of her budding celebrity and the scrutiny that comes with it. “It’s not fun that every single minute mistake you ever make could be blown out of proportion…There are a lot of really awesome, cool things about this job, but it is a job.”
***
Thus far, Rousey’s missteps have been overshadowed by—and in some cases only added to—her innate marketability. In a very short period of time, her fame has reached unprecedented heights, and it’s only beginning to snowball. The general consensus in the MMA community is that as big as she is now, she’s about to get much, much bigger.
To that end, the McMann fight comes at a strange time in Rousey’s career. After she defeated Tate as part of the UFC’s biggest selling pay-per-view of 2013, White came to the post-fight press conference with the poster for her fight against McMann already printed up.
Afterward, she’s going to take some time off. She’s already landed roles in the upcoming Entourage movie as well as the film adaptation of Brad Thor’s The Athena Project. Despite the fact she’s tried to downplay this sort of talk, there is a growing unease that she might soon leave the sport to chase Hollywood dreams.
If that’s the plan, though, she is not admitting it.
“The UFC’s agreed to give me some time off, a good amount of time,” she says. “They gave me a timeline, like the maximum time that I could take off, but I don’t think I’m going to take all that. I think I’ll be back sooner than they expect me.”
She appears cool, calm and collected leading up to this fight—a far cry from the buildup to the Tate bout—and is saying all the right things about McMann being her toughest challenger to date. At the same time, with a scheduled vacation on the horizon and a couple of new movie jobs locked down, it’s easy to assume Rousey just wants to get this one in the books.
“Physically and mentally it’ll be nice to have a break after doing back-to-back camps,” she says. “But I’m not the type to just sit around and do nothing. I think having some things (like acting) to focus on in the meantime will actually help me rest more than just sitting around and staring at the wall.”
Sounds like she’s got it all figured out.
There’s just one catch.
On this Wednesday afternoon while Rousey is getting her massage, there’s a woman 2,400 miles away who is working to take it all away from her.
***
On paper, Sara McMann is not so different from Rousey.
They both took up their respective sports at young ages—McMann as a freshman in high school, Rousey even earlier than that. For years they both toiled in the obscurity of amateurism, competing all over the world and winning a slew of medals at events like the Pan American Games, World Championships and Olympics.
They’ve both overcome significant adversity in their private lives. Rousey nearly died at birth from a lack of oxygen and didn’t speak until she was six. Her father committed suicide when she was eight, after a long struggle with a blood disorder and the debilitating effects of a sledding accident.
McMann’s brother was murdered in 1999, and that year, she left school at Lock Haven University to be close to her family. In 2004, her fiance died after a car wreck while McMann was driving.
They’ve both talked about the tragedies in in public and with the media but have refused to be defined by them. Still, it may not be too great a stretch to say those early hardships in part fueled their near peerless athletic careers.
When their lengthy runs as amateurs ended, McMann and Rousey both transitioned to MMA around the same time, making their professional debuts just two months apart during the spring of 2011. Today, they are both undefeated with comparable levels of experience—McMann is 7-0, while Rousey is 8-0—and head into Saturday’s UFC 170 as two of the best 135-pound fighters on the planet.
And that’s where the similarities end.
Because while Rousey rode a bullet train to the top, McMann’s path has been less direct and far lower-profile.
***
Rousey had just two fights and four-and-a-half months of experience before she made the jump to the Strikeforce organization, which was the biggest purveyor of women’s MMA at the time. McMann navigated the stormy seas of the sport’s independent circuit for much longer.
She appeared at small-time events with names like Universal Cage Combat and BlackEye Promotions before earning her UFC deal with a one-fight pit stop in the respected, all-women’s Invicta FC promotion in July, 2012.
Today, while Rousey lives in LA—and there is perhaps nothing that describes her more succinctly than “living in L.A.”—McMann trains in the town of Gaffney, South Carolina, outside Greenville. Official population: 12,414.
She’s 33 years old, six years older than Rousey, and balances her MMA career with raising a four-year-old daughter with her longtime boyfriend, the wrestling coach at Gaffney’s small liberal arts college.
That life Rousey has planned for herself? The magazine covers, fashion shoots and movie roles? McMann desires no part of it.
“I absolutely do not want that whatsoever,” she says. “I’m a lot more private, a lot more low key. It’s not an accident that I haven’t gotten as much attention. I try to avoid it as much as I possibly can.”
She says she very much wants to win the UFC title. “I’m not going to lie to you,” she quips, “I do love to win.” But she doesn’t crave the lifestyle that comes with it. Tee her up a softball question about how her life will change if she manages to become UFC champion, and she just laughs.
“I might be committed to a mental institution from the media attention,” she says. “That’s probably how it will change the most. The people who care about me and love me will still care about me and love me. People who don’t like me will still not like me. I’ll just have to do it more publicly.”
McMann holds a master’s degree in mental health counseling from Gardner-Webb University and talks about going to work with kids when her MMA career is over. She wants to have another baby and joked to Fox Sports last week that if life as a UFC titlist gets too hectic, she’ll “just get pregnant.”
Despite their parallel careers in judo and wrestling, and though women’s MMA circles are still comparatively small, she had never met Rousey before the UFC made the bout late last year. Naturally, the champion’s reputation preceded her, but thus far their interactions have been about as cordial as could be expected from two women about to fight each other inside a cage.
“I try to stay out of drama…,” McMann says. “It’s always the same thing with my opponents, they’re somebody else that’s trying to do the same thing that you’re trying to do. They’re not horrible people, they’re not Hitler. It’s not like you have to hate people (to fight them). Well, I don’t, at least.”
***
Even now, days away from appearing in a main event pay-per-view bout against MMA’s biggest crossover star, most of the things McMann says sound more like the words of a gritty amateur wrestler than a glitzy prizefighter.
When she discusses her chances in their upcoming fight, she sounds like a technician who is talking about her craft. Sure, she wants the title, but she says it’s more about testing herself, implementing the techniques and strategies she’s drilled in training in a live-fire situation.
If she can do that, then victory and defeat will be secondary concerns.
At least that’s the story she’s sticking to for now.
“It’s about the journey for me…,” McMann says. “I’ve had matches where I went out and wrestled my absolute heart out, did the best that I possibly could do and didn’t get the win. That didn’t sting nearly as bad as the feeling of missing opportunities or having a really, really crappy performance. Those are the things that will haunt me more than my losses.”
***
Ask Rousey if there’s anything she misses about those old judo days—the hard work crossed with the anonymity, the travel and the half-empty stadiums—and for five seconds all you’ll get is a long pause. She starts a sentence and then stops. For perhaps the first time, there is real conflict in her voice.
“Well,” she says finally, “there’s a reason I quit.”
She lapses into what sounds like prepared material, making a joke out of it, saying sometimes she misses going out in public and looking like a slob. She can’t go to the coffee shop in her pajamas anymore, she says, can’t slip off to the store with her hair going a thousand different ways. These days, she has to make an effort.
“I can’t look like a crazy cat lady…” she cracks. “I think that’s good, that I’ve had to increase my overall personal hygiene. I can’t really complain about that.”
It’s funny, but the message is clear: She likes her life.
The 24-hour circus that surrounds her now is at least in part her own doing. White says after this fight she’ll break into the top 10 in career earnings among UFC fighters all time. When you think about how brief her stay with the company has been, that’s an incredible feat.
Her celebrity is still very much on the upswing. She’s MMA’s “It girl”—the sparkling, breakout star nobody saw coming.
At the moment, there’s no telling exactly how big she’s going to get.
And she’s not about to let McMann rob her of that.
***
According to Best Fight Odds, Rousey will be something approaching a 4-1 favorite when the two women take the cage on Saturday night.
That seems lopsided, but the whole idea of competitiveness has been a relative concept throughout her career. The fact is, she’s destroyed everyone she’s ever fought. McMann being merely a plus-385 underdog means oddsmakers see her as the most dangerous foe of Rousey’s short UFC campaign.
Rousey believes that, too. She points to McMann’s Olympic experience as evidence of her dangerous athleticism and the fact she won’t shrink from the moment, despite having just one previous UFC appearance under her belt.
“Her athletic background (shows) she’s definitely going to deal with being in a high-pressure situation better than I think almost any other girl in the division could,” Rousey says. “Except maybe Liz Carmouche, who was trained to be a Marine and be in combat. I think (McMann) will have a similar type of performance.”
Carmouche was Rousey’s first UFC opponent, a 7-1 long shot who nearly shocked the world by climbing on her back and securing a choke in the first round.
So, the comparison is not one that Rousey makes lightly.
Still, there are concerns that, stylistically, this isn’t a great fight for McMann. Her silver-medal wrestling is obviously her best quality, but going to the ground with Rousey means diving headlong into the champion’s vaunted submission game. Nobody has yet managed to do that and emerge with two working arms.
On the other hand, if McMann uses her grappling defensively and attempts to test Rousey’s rudimentary but ever-evolving striking, she’ll have to do it without getting sucked into the champion’s arsenal of judo throws. History has shown that if Rousey is able to grab hold of an opponent on her own terms, it’s going to be a short night.
It could be a pick-your-poison situation for McMann, who is known more as a grinder than for crafting dynamic stoppages, even though she beat Sheila Gaff by first-round TKO in her UFC debut.
“She’s definitely a much more cautious and methodical fighter than anybody I’ve fought before,” Rousey says. “I expect her to approach this in that way. You can see from her past fights that she’s not really a finisher, and so I don’t know if she would suddenly approach this fight in that way. We expect everything, but we’re definitely more prepared for what she has a tendency to do.”
***
For her part, McMann isn’t buying any part of that scouting report.
“I plan on winning every position,” she says. “If you go in and you’re positionally strong and you go to not just counteract somebody else, but to set your own pace and set your own game plan, that’s how you beat people.”
Her best strategy may well be to wear Rousey down in a long, physically taxing fight. Afterward, she’ll take the title and go back to her normal life in South Carolina.
She doesn’t want to steal Rousey’s shine or refashion her fame in her own image. She just wants to win this athletic competition and then return to being a regular person—a mom and a hardworking fighter—with just a little more public recognition of how good she is at what she does.
It’s impossible to tell if that idea irks Rousey, who says it’s perfectly understandable that McMann would want to preserve as much of her privacy as possible.
Then again, Rousey says this as a person for whom privacy no longer really exists—a person who knows that her life will never be normal again.
What’s more, she says it as a person who doesn’t want to be ordinary.
Not again. Not if she can help it.
***
In an hour-long documentary produced by the UFC and Fox Sports prior to the Tate fight, Rousey said that as a child, she didn’t dream of growing up to be an accountant or a dentist. She wanted something more.
“I wanted to be something extraordinary,” she said in the show’s opening scene. “I wanted to be a superhero.”
Now a version of that dream has come true. She’s the best female fighter in the world and perhaps the most well-known fighter in the UFC, regardless of gender. When her career is over, if everything has gone according to plan, she’ll go down as the biggest star that MMA has ever produced.
She’s not going back to where she came from. Not willingly, anyway.
She only wants to go forward, no matter the cost.
“I think you do have to sacrifice a certain amount in order to be a UFC champ,” Rousey says. “It’s not like being an Olympic champion, where you can go win and have everyone’s attention for a second, say what’s up to a Wheaties box and then return to being normal. It really does change your lifestyle, and maybe she doesn’t really want the lifestyle that comes along with being a UFC champion, but I do.”
Chad Dundas is a Mixed Martial Arts Lead Writer for Bleacher Report. All quotes were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.
Add Nate Quarry to the growing chorus of former UFC fighters who are taking aim at the company on a number of fronts.
Quarry has been out in force with criticisms of his former employer recently, authoring a post on the UG and giving wide-ranging inter…
Add Nate Quarry to the growing chorus of former UFC fighters who are taking aim at the company on a number of fronts.
Quarry has been out in force with criticisms of his former employer recently, authoring a post on the UGand giving wide-ranging interviews to Bloody Elbow and MMA Junkie on the topics of UFC fighter pay, contracts and the potential of the organization adopting “uniforms” for its athletes.
As former welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre continues to speak openly about drug testing in MMA, Quarry’s most recent comments give some added momentum to a few of the sport’s most vexing issues.
“I always make a reference to my title fight against (Rich) Franklin,” Quarry told BE’s Steph Daniels. “I ask people, ‘What do you think a title fight main event, in the MGM Grand on pay-per-view will get you?’ People usually guess about a million dollars. I got paid $10,000. No bonus, no nothing. When I lost, I went back to my original contract of $5,000 to show and $5,000 to win. People are shocked by that.”
It’s always interesting to hear from former fighters, once they feel they have nothing to fear by speaking out about their careers. Too often in professional sports, the active participants fall back on platitudes and clichés to avoid saying anything of substance in public. Once they’ve made a clean break from the industry, they often find they can express themselves more clearly.
Whether those expressions should be categorized as reasoned criticisms or sour grapes must always be considered on a case-by-case basis.
For Quarry—a former Ultimate Fighter contestant, No. 1 middleweight contender and fight analyst—it’s hard to cast him as a bitter outsider with an axe to grind. During most of his latest interactions with fans and media, he comes off as level-headed and honest, if at times a bit naïve.
Among his complaints was the fragile security provided by UFC contracts, which give the company the option to release an athlete after a single loss. Again Quarry pitched his idea that new hires should be assured of at least three fights per year in the Octagon, with a minimum base salary of $10,000 per fight.
“That way, you know that at a minimum you’re making $30,000 for one year’s worth of fights,” Quarry said. “It’s tough. That’s close to poverty wages, but it at least gives a fighter some consistency; knowing that they’re going to have a job for at least a year. Nobody wants to show up at work knowing if they have an off day they’re going to be fired.”
Quarry—who said he lost his sponsorship with the And1 shoe company when the UFC instituted its current $50,000 fee for fighter sponsors—also questioned recent talk that the UFC could institute “uniforms” for athletes in the near future.
“Once again, that’s just completely screwing over the fighters,” he said. “I was making more money from sponsors than I was from fighting, quite often. To take that away…you’re saying once again that the UFC is all about the UFC.”
Give Quarry credit also for taking a pragmatic view of the idea of a fighter’s union, the somewhat fanciful notion that is often bandied as the cure-all for what ails MMA, but has never—and likely will never—gain any traction in the sport.
“I don’t think a fighters union is even remotely possible,” he said. “I think it would take something like a major class action lawsuit. That could come in time; I wouldn’t be surprised if there was one in the next 5-10 years, because there will be so many guys retiring with nothing. They’ll see that they did all this work and have nothing to show for it.”
The testosterone replacement therapy era ended swiftly and unexpectedly on Thursday, with all the fireworks of a subdued but unanimous vote by the Nevada State Athletic Commission.