Ronda Rousey has become the most dominant female athlete of all time.
Now before you go looking up my email address to send me names like Serena Williams, Babe Zaharias and Jackie Joyner-Kersee , let me give you some stats.
In her first 10 fights as a mixed martial artist in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, only one of her opponents escaped the first round.
She’s finished eight of her opponents with the exact same move — a submission by arm bar that hyperextends the elbow, causing excruciating pain in the process.
She’s also finished eight of those 10 opponents in less than a minute.
No fighter in UFC history has dominated to that level, and that includes the male legends of the sport such as Anderson Silva, Randy Couture and Royce Gracie . They all had their share of tough fights and close calls throughout their careers.
Her arm bar is the fighting equivalent to Randy Johnson’s fastball, Allen Iverson’s crossover and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s skyhook.
You know it’s coming. You don’t know when, but when it does there’s nothing you can do to stop it.
But one of the biggest knocks on her game was that she was too one-dimensional. She could finish fights with her jiu-jitsu, but critics said she hadn’t become a well-rounded fighter in her striking.
In her ninth fight at UFC 170 she put those criticisms to bed, winning by technical knockout versus Sara McMann with a knee to the midsection.
It physically hurt me as I watched it. Abdominal muscles were not meant to sustain a human battering ram.
She responded once again by knocking out Alexis Davis 16 seconds into her fight Sunday at UFC 175. By the time Rousey threw her to the mat, slapped a headlock on her and attempted to fuse her head to the mat with hammer fists, Davis was so out of it she tried to take down the referee in confusion after he called the match.
Obviously, all this would be impressive by itself. She’s a 5-foot-7, 135-pound killing machine to whom I would never want to owe money.
But consider before the UFC belt and her countless Fight of the Night, Submission of the Night and Fighter of the Year awards, she was an Olympic bronze medalist in Judo during the 2008 Summer Olympics and had dominated her competition on the international judo circuit.
She won gold at the Pan American Judo Championships in 2005 and 2006 and became the first American woman to win a Judo World Championship medal in 2007. After that, she went on to win gold at the Pan American Games in 2007 with a torn meniscus in her knee.
I could keep listing her accolades, but this would start to read like a Wikipedia article.
Rousey is only 27 years old. She still has a long career ahead of her, and she’s already established herself as one of the best athletes, let alone female athletes, to emerge in the 21st century.
She defies expectations in a way that hasn’t really been matched in history in a sport that doesn’t lend itself to the ordinary.
She’s a great role model for young women looking to get into sports, and she has the opportunity to change the way people look at women’s athletics.
One day we’ll look back at how important Ronda Rousey was and what her legacy means.
But for now, I’ll have to be satisfied with watching her gracefully destroy opponents on pay-per-view every few months.
aknorth@indiana.edu
