The most shocking thing about Ronda Rousey’s knockout loss to Holly Holm on Saturday at UFC 193 is the speed with which it turned Rousey into a tragic figure.
A week ago this time she was the brightest star the fight company had ever produced, swaggering through life with a black hoodie and a death glare as she destroyed an increasingly overmatched series of underdog opponents.
Then came Holm’s earth-shattering head kick and on Tuesday, Rousey crept through LA International Airport with a pillow covering her battered face. She was unable to even look at the paparazzi cameras that so recently loved her so much.
It was hard to watch. The fact the only recognizable person at her side was boyfriend Travis Browne—a churlish UFC heavyweight technically still married to another woman who recently accused him of domestic violence—didn’t exactly make us think everything was going to be OK either.
This was certainly not any way we ever expected to see the woman we once believed would never relinquish her UFC bantamweight championship.
It was certainly not any way Rousey ever expected to see herself.
And so this is where the story gets really interesting.
Rousey must now unexpectedly find her way back from the land of the defeated. She vowed to return in a short post to her Instagram account on Monday, but this first glimpse makes it seem as though the rebuilding process—mental and otherwise—may be a lengthy one.
How Rousey approaches this comeback she never thought she’d have to make?
That’ll be the most fascinating thing she’s ever done.
She still has the skills to be champion. Anyone who tells you Holm automatically takes the rematch probably claimed Rousey would win in a cakewalk a week ago. The former champion opened as the (very) early betting favorite in their potential second bout, according to Odds Shark, most likely targeted for UFC 200 in July 2016.
Clearly, though, some things will never be the same again.
So much of Rousey’s public persona prior to Saturday night was based around being unbeatable. She sailed to mainstream celebrity on a wave of her own braggadocio. She beefed with Floyd Mayweather Jr., hobnobbed with fawning movie stars and showed her opponents no compassion.
During her four-year MMA run she cast a dozen of the world’s top fighters into the doldrums with crushing losses. She handed several of them—Bethe Correia, Cat Zingano, Sara McMann and Charmaine Tweet—their first professional defeat and didn’t seem to trouble herself with what became of them afterward.
“I’m going to retire undefeated,” Rousey said in February, while preparing for her 14-second victory over Zingano at UFC 184. “I’ll beat everybody one by one and go about my merry way.”
Now that she walks among the losers the way suddenly isn’t so merry anymore.
Reaction to the loss has been swift and cruel. The memes flow like wine. For a woman who spent so much time and energy cultivating her own “Bad Reputation,” Rousey can’t expect much sympathy.
Still, there’s something ghoulish about some of it. It makes you wonder about the true nature of this “Rousey Revolution” the UFC worked overtime to pitch during the lead up to UFC 193.
There’s no doubting Rousey’s star power or her ability to appeal to a wider audience than the average MMA champion. But the strange outpouring of glee in the wake of such an ugly defeat makes it seem as though there were a lot more people hate-watching her than we ever considered before.
Maybe her demographic wasn’t really made up of starry-eyed little girls looking for a role model. Maybe it was just a bunch mean-spirited fight fans waiting to pounce on her first mistake. Either way, will that audience come back?
Is it even possible for the ex-champ to return from this stunning knockout loss and go right back to her previous “Rowdy” ways? Will her bad-to-the-bone attitude still play now that we’ve seen her shaken and disoriented on the floor of the Octagon, trying to figure out what just happened?
Will mainstream entities like ESPN still be so infatuated? Will Mark Walhberg and The Rock still be so effusive in their praise? In short, can she reclaim her spot as the UFC’s biggest star?
Should she?
We know what UFC President Dana White thinks.
“She’s the mentally strongest f—ing athlete I’ve ever met in my life,” White said at the UFC 193 post-fight press conference, per MMA Junkie’s Mike Bohn. “When she gets over this loss, she’s going to be a savage. She was a maniac and a hard-worker when she was the best in the world. What’s she going to be like now that she lost?”
That is the multimillion-dollar question for Rousey and the UFC now. It seems like to return with the savagery promised by her fight company boss, she might have to make some changes.
Her longtime coach—Edmond Tarverdyan—has been eviscerated in the court of public opinion. Their association doesn’t seem long for the world, though a split would leave Rousey with a lot of new questions about where and how she’ll get ready to rematch Holm.
We just know what she did the first time around didn’t work.
In retrospect, the red flags in her shield of invincibility probably should have been obvious leading up to this fight. From the infighting between her mother and Tarverdyan, to her troubling relationship with Browne to her typical bevvy of media appearances (some good, some bad), her life seemed especially chaotic.
These distractions hardly went unnoticed—nothing about Rousey ever does. In the moment, however, most people assumed she would be dominant enough to rise above any adversity. After watching her unconscious body slump to the canvas from Holm’s head kick early in the second round of Saturday night’s main event, our sensibilities seem to have changed.
Will Rousey’s do the same?
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