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Rousey adds a new dimension. First, she's blessed with phenomenal talent. She won a bronze medal in judo at the Beijing Olympics and has beaten eight of her nine amateur and pro MMA opponents in under a minute. As a woman, she can draw more female fans to the UFC. (Right now, the UFC says, 39% of its fan base is female.)
She can certainly attract guys too. Headline from a cheeky December article on her in an Australian newspaper: MY HUSBAND'S FALLEN FOR A MARTIAL ARTS BABE. She has posed nude for ESPN: The Magazine's Body Issue; she has discussed her training habit of having as much sex as possible before fights because, as some studies suggest, it raises testosterone levels. "Unfortunately, I don't have a boyfriend right now," Rousey says, "so I'm s--- out of luck."
Rousey knows her pretty face and potty mouth increase her hype. "Yeah, the looks thing helps, because this isn't amateur sports," she says. "This isn't the Olympics. This isn't idealism. It's professional sports, a marketing business. If you're a girl, f---ing looks help in every single industry out there. It's just a f---ing fact of life."
Rousey has been a fighter from the beginning. She was born with her umbilical cord around her neck; she couldn't speak coherently until she was 6. By then, her family had moved from California to North Dakota, where she could work with the respected speech therapists at Minot State University. She competed in youth swim races, and her father Ron would scoop her out of bed and drive her to early-morning meets. "I was a daddy's girl," she says. He broke his back in a sledding accident and later contracted a rare blood disorder from which he could never fully recover; when Ronda was 8, Ron committed suicide.
After the family moved back to Southern California, she followed in the footsteps of her mother AnnMaria, who won a judo world championship in 1984. She pushed her daughter hard, and Ronda made the 2004 Olympic team at age 17. But the work left scars. She tears up recalling a time, when she was 16, that her mother drove her to train in San Diego, despite a bleeding ear and throbbing headache.
After the 2008 Olympics, Rousey was finished with judo. "I call it post-Olympic depression," she says. She got a $10,000 bronze-medal bonus, which after taxes covered about half the price of a used 2005 Honda Accord. She worked as a cocktail waitress; she bartended at a pirate-themed joint in downtown Los Angeles. She also worked the graveyard shift at a 24-Hour Fitness. She grappled at a gym to stay in shape, and friends encouraged her to try MMA.
She caught the fighting bug again. Her mother, among others, wasn't convinced she was making the right move, but such doubt only fueled Rousey. "It was almost like I was out for revenge when I trained," she says. "I had never been so motivated in my life. Every second of the day, I was like, What else can I do? What else can I do? I was shadowboxing in the f---ing shower, all the time." In her Venice house, a half-dozen tennis balls dangle on strings from the ceiling; she tries to take a thousand whacks at them a day.