Ronda Rousey’s first appearance in WWE wasn’t exactly a towering home run, but it will do for now.
In the wake of her disastrous second straight UFC loss in December 2016, many MMA fans suspected Rousey might wash up on the shores of professional wrestling eventually. It was no great surprise, then, to see her debut in WWE following Sunday’s Royal Rumble, just in time for the final push toward Wrestlemania 34 on April 8.
Rousey didn’t wrestle or even speak during her brief appearance at the Rumble, and she didn’t appear at all on the next night’s episode of Monday Night Raw.
Early reports say the former UFC women’s bantamweight champion signed to become a “full-time” member of WWE’s roster, but with dissension already in the ranks and no intel on whether she can actually wrestle, nobody is sure what to expect from Rousey at Wrestlemania or beyond.
Publicly, she’s resolute, telling ESPN’s Ramona Shelburne that she’s in wrestling for the foreseeable future.
“This is my life now,” Rousey said. “First priority on my timeline for the next several years.”
If that’s true, then perhaps the blueprint for Rousey’s best-case scenario has already been drawn up by another former UFC champion: Brock Lesnar.
Since winning the NCAA Division I national heavyweight wrestling championship for the University of Minnesota in 2000, Lesnar’s own athletic life has been a fairly nomadic one. He’s essentially hopped back and forth between the WWE and UFC for the last nine years and—excepting a failed attempt to make it to the NFL in 2004—he’s been undeniably successful everywhere he’s landed.
At 40, the Webster, South Dakota, native’s star is still so bright, he can pretty much come and go as he pleases. The UFC will always take Lesnar when it can get him, and so will the WWE. The man is welcome wherever he decides to be, and his performance contract can always be amended to make it work.
If Rousey wants to make it in pro wrestling, then Lesnar makes a good role model.
Her life story doesn’t perfectly mirror Lesnar’s, but the broad strokes are close enough. After an amateur career as a world-class judoka, her rise to the top of the MMA world was just as meteoric. She doubled as UFC 135-pound champion and its biggest mainstream star from February 2013-November 2015, until back-to-back losses to Holly Holm and Amanda Nunes sent her into a tailspin.
After spending the majority of the last two years away from the limelight, her sudden re-emergence in WWE could end up benefitting both parties.
For Rousey, a lifelong pro-wrestling fan, it gives her the chance to fulfill a childhood dream while simultaneously making a lot of money and perhaps beginning to rehabilitate her image as a fighter. While her two losses dealt a serious blow to her reputation in the eyes of MMA fans, the WWE will still welcome her as a conquering destroyer.
For the wrestling promotion, it gets a bankable PPV star to advertise in its biggest event of the year. If Rousey can convince even a fraction of the people who followed her MMA career to either buy WrestleMania on PPV or sign up for the WWE’s digital streaming service, then the company can likely count her signing as a significant win.
If she can pull off the transition and truly become a “full-time” wrestler, maybe she can become the Lesnar of WWE’s women’s division.
Perhaps she will rapidly rise to the top and become a champion in both sports and sports entertainment, just as Lesnar did.
Perhaps WWE will be able to mask her relative inexperience and use her legitimate fighting chops to present her as an unstoppable wrecking machine.
Perhaps her natural athleticism and passion for WWE will help her win over her new peers.
Maybe, also like Lesnar, she can continue to make periodic UFC appearances.
Rousey refused to close the book on her involvement with MMA during this week’s interview with Shelburne. While she admitted she hasn’t really followed the women’s bantamweight division since she’s been gone and still seemed so shaken by her losses to Holm and Nunes that she declined to discuss them, she left the door wide open for a return.
“I wouldn’t doubt myself doing anything,” Rousey said.
Clearly, the UFC would love to have her. She maintains a cozy relationship with company president Dana White and assumedly with new ownership at Endeavor. With UFC PPV numbers on the decline during 2017, you can bet the organization would jump at the chance to put on a Rousey fight whenever it could do so.
Such an arrangement would likely be better for Rousey, too, given that she could sit back and be selective about her opponents, rather than perennially taking on the 135-pound champion or No. 1 contender.
Still, we shouldn’t underestimate the challenge of making the jump to WWE. By joining the biggest wrestling company in the world during its highest-profile time of the year, Rousey is being cast into the deep end of the pool with very little experience to draw on.
Even Lesnar spent some time in WWE’s developmental system before making the jump to the main roster.
Rousey has not been given that luxury.
A year or two from now, it’s possible her experimental dive into WWE will already be over, branded a dreadful failure.
But if we can ever look back on her experience there and compare Rousey to Lesnar, then it will have been a smashing success.
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