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There’s a life cycle to the careers of most elite MMA fighters. First is the rise to prominence, fighting on smaller shows before making it to the big leagues and then into the title mix. They then have their run at peak fame and success. Inevitably, they can no longer compete at the elite level, and they gradually move down the card. If they really don’t want to retire, they finally find themselves back at the smaller shows at which they started. Few MMA superstars burst onto the scene out of nowhere; fewer still disappear with little warning. Instead, they tend to fade.
Ronda Rousey’s career, whether you ultimately view her in a favorable or unfavorable light, has not followed that traditional mold. She was a dominant champion and outspoken star within a year of turning pro. She reached heights of mainstream notoriety few fighters have ever reached. Perhaps most strikingly, if UFC 207 on Dec. 30 was Rousey’s last MMA fight, she went out in a burst of flames like few ever have. She went from making her opponents look like they didn’t belong in the cage with her to looking like she had no place in the cage with her opponents practically overnight.
Most fighters at this point in Rousey’s position would be planning a path back into the title picture. That quest to recapture lost glory has led many fighters down the sad path towards obscurity. Rousey is in position to be a unique exception and walk away for good at age 29 for two key reasons.
First is the number of options she possesses outside the Octagon. She has already made massive amounts of money, and even with the blow to her reputation over the past year, she still will have plenty of opportunities to make money off her fame and stature. Second, she has always possessed a distinctive, ultra-competitive outlook that makes her approach both losing and the prospect of losing differently than most human beings. Some fighters enjoy the process of preparing for a fight and then competing, win, lose or draw. Rousey is not one of those fighters. Losing looms too large in her head to fight if she’s not fully confident she will dominate.
The combination of financial options and mental approach makes a Rousey retirement seem quite likely. If she does, her shooting star of a career will likely make her even more of a source of intrigue as time goes on. A career that features a steady rise followed by a gradual decline is easy to explain. Rousey’s career offers up far more in the way of questions as to why exactly she fell so quickly and hard.
Was Rousey a victim of her own success, overconfident and unwilling to change? Were outside distractions like the commercials, movies and books too much? Did Holly Holm break her mentally? Did the sport develop and the other fighters in the division catch up with her? Was it a matter of favorable and unfavorable style matchups? Was it all Edmond Tarverdyan’s fault?
Tarverdyan in particular has been a lightning rod since Rousey’s loss to Amanda Nunes. He has been blamed for hurting Rousey’s career by everyone from Nunes to Rousey’s own mother. Still, even when it comes to Tarverdyan, the focus has to shift back to Rousey herself. MMA is not a team sport where players are forced to play for whatever coaches are hired. Rousey was the one who elected to keep Tarverdyan on and to train in the ways he suggested. She had agency in the situation and chose to follow the path she did. In the end, success and failure both point back to Rousey herself.
There has been an effort by some, generally people who don’t follow MMA that closely, to observe there has been some sort of change in Rousey’s personality that coincided with her fall. This logically would lead to the implication that there were two Rouseys, just like some fans would differentiate the less successful “new” Vitor Belfort from the “old Vitor Belfort,” which later led to the creation of the testosterone replacement therapy-fueled new old Vitor Belfort and finally the old new Vitor Belfort.
The bifurcation of Rousey is a position that doesn’t stand up to a lot of scrutiny. The same rage Rousey exhibited at the weigh-ins for her fight with Holm and for the fight with Nunes in general is the same rage that drove her throughout her career. It was there for Miesha Tate, Bethe Correia and most anyone that got in her way. She was always driven by perceived slights and never particularly gracious in victory or defeat. Rousey’s fall needs a deeper analysis than idealizing the successful Rousey and distinguishing her from the figure getting pummeled the last two times out.
The lack of easy answers makes Rousey’s story more interesting. This was one of the most dominant figures we’ve seen in MMA history; then suddenly, she not only lost her supremacy but became a punching bag. If UFC 207 was Rousey’s last MMA fight, people will be debating what exactly happened for years to come.