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Rousey's best move is known as the armbar. In each of her six pro fights in lower MMA promotions, she applied torturous pressure to her opponent's elbow, forcing her to give up. "You put the arm in a position where it can't bend naturally anymore," Rousey says of her technique. "It's like a pop, pop, squish. When you get to the squish, that means there's no more pops."
She will earn $45,000 for appearing in the fight and another $45,000 if she wins--about half what the UFC's male heavyweight champ received for winning a December bout. White, the savvy, sometimes profane UFC commissioner, is committed to staging women's fights for the next year and a half, then re-evaluating. "I'm giving this a shot," he says.
Rousey thinks plenty of UFC fans aren't giving her a shot. "There are so many people who want me to fail," she says, citing vitriolic comments posted about her on fan sites and Twitter. Those can be inhospitable forums even for people who aren't trailblazing MMA fighters, but there's no doubt that the sight of two women punching, kicking and pummeling each other is far less familiar--and potentially far more discomfiting, even repellent--than two men in the same cage. "It's women in a role that people aren't used to seeing them," she says. "If you see a girl get popped in the face really hard, you're like, Ooooooh. It's so much more emotional."
More emotional and, to Rousey, more compelling. "You never see a boring girl's fight," she says. "Those girls have a chip on their shoulders. They have something to prove. They're not in there to win matches. They're in there to make a point. The point is that they deserve to be in there." Squish.