Everyone Failed Ronda Rousey
Women’s mixed martial arts pioneer Ronda Rousey’s new book, Our Fight, is a remarkable document. If her first book, 2015’s best-selling My Fight / Your Fight, was intended to establish the Bronze Medal-winning judoka and then-UFC women’s bantamweight champion as the greatest combat athlete of all time, this book — also co-written with Maria Burns Ortiz — explains how it all went south so quickly. Indeed, in the annals of athlete autobiographies, this book stands apart. A closer comparison, in tone if not in content or literary significance, might be scholastic philosopher Peter Abelard’s 1132 epistolary autobiography, The History of My Calamities, in which the great schoolman describes how his life’s work has led to persecution not dissimilar to that faced by Jesus Christ.
Rousey is no messiah, though she does claim for herself a Moses-like role as a women’s trailblazer in the early part of Our Fight. She was, she tells us, the woman who urged UFC boss Dana White to stop announcing participants in the women’s weight classes with the adjective “women’s” modifying these classes (this can lead to a bit of confusion, given that the company has two bantamweight and two flyweight divisions; are Raquel “Rocky” Pennington and “Suga” Sean O’Malley bantamweight co-champs?). Indeed, it’s hard to forget that mid-2010s Rousey was claiming she could beat all-time boxing great Floyd Mayweather in an MMA fight. As marketing went, it was top-tier boasting — until women’s boxing great Holly Holm knocked out Rousey in November 2015.
It is this loss that started Rousey down the trail of tears culminating in Our Story, an interesting title given that she explicitly tells us that “I don’t think my story is that different from everyone else’s” save for how “the not-as-relatable bits are what make things interesting.” The loss to Holm, which appeared to most outside observers as an overconfident Rousey attempting to stand and trade blows with a superior striker, has been retconned: it was the result of Rousey’s “perfect” approach, the “most effective and efficient fighting system that ever existed,” giving way in the face of a single strike. Rousey, you see, had already been concussed hundreds of times by abusive judo coaches and badly overworked by cruel Glendale Fighting Club gym owner Edmond Tarverdyan, so her eggshell skull was unable to absorb even a handful of weak strikes. The two women who beat her — Holm and actual women’s MMA “greatest of all time” claimant Amanda Nunes, who ruled two weight classes far longer than Rousey dominated one — weren’t any good; they just landed lucky hits. Nunes’ strike, in fact, was so lucky that Rousey claims she cannot recall even a split second of their fight.
This degree of arrogance and self-absorption is oddly refreshing, even in a genre that revels in precisely those qualities. Ronda Rousey could never be beaten by anyone else besides her own body, which has only betrayed her because her various coaches and trainers, outside of her judo-champion mother, had betrayed her. Her “perfect” system never cost her a fight; she merely ran out of ways to avoid being hit.
From there, Rousey went the way of so many washed-up athletes before her: she entered pro wrestling. She spends a great deal of time on the lead-up to her debut at WrestleMania 34 in 2018, where current WWE head of creative Triple H, veteran amateur wrestling great Kurt Angle, and Stephanie McMahon spent weeks walking her through a tag team match that was well-received by most longtime observers. This successful debut, however, was followed by an extended failure to launch across two separate multi-year stints with the company. During that time, Rousey found herself becoming roundly booed by fans and panned by critics for flat microphone work and repetitive matches. Meanwhile, several internally-developed wrestlers, most notably second-generation superstar Charlotte Flair and “The Man” Becky Lynch, became clear-cut main-event stars — something Rousey freely admits she was not.
Of course, according to Rousey, none of this was her fault, either. Her debut match had succeeded because so much time went into laying it out; her other matches suffered because they didn’t get weeks of rehearsal. Despite her various world title runs, she could never win over the fans — but this wasn’t because she simply didn’t present herself well as a good guy and waited too long to lean into her arrogant bad-guy side, it was because “geriatric” Vince McMahon frequently changed creative plans on the fly.
Rousey’s body, already injured, never got sufficient time to heal from in-ring injuries, and the pregnancy that occasioned her leave of absence from 2020 to 2022 led to further declines, in part because she freely admits that she preferred pot smoking and snacking to hard training in the gym. Her tag team run with longtime friend and MMA training partner Shayna Baszler — a much better pro wrestler than Rousey, albeit one with even less charisma — failed because the WWE wouldn’t commit enough television time to it, and her final match, an MMA-style affair against Baszler at SummerSlam in 2023, got booed because the fans couldn’t appreciate all of the MMA Easter eggs the pair embedded in the bout. On top of that, Rousey found herself ignominiously breastfeeding in business class, because she, unlike current celebrity-turned-wrestler Logan Paul, wasn’t getting chartered flights to the various shows.
In other words, Ronda didn’t fail the WWE; the organization, which has managed to make megastars out of some truly unimpressive specimens, failed her. But this is par for the course, and Ronda managed to make lemons out of lemonade by working in some timely jabs at Vince McMahon in light of his recent lawsuit-driven departure from the company he built. This is fine — McMahon was clearly a creep of the highest order, as substantiated by decades of reporting on the man — but this book has clearly been in production for a while given that the majority of the criticisms of the ex-owner are found toward the end, while some early moments when McMahon praised Rousey are retained. Was this an editorial oversight on behalf of co-author Burns Ortiz, or a judicious Rousey being careful to ensure that all instances of praise for her greatness were preserved for posterity?
The answer, like the underlying reality that serves merely as scaffolding for Rousey’s self-serving history of her struggles, doesn’t matter. For most MMA pioneers, like UFC legend Dan Severn, it would be enough to state that their success in the sport was due to the rest of their opponents not yet having caught up to the outside skills they brought to the cage. This was why jiu-jitsu specialist Royce Gracie and Olympic wrestler Mark Coleman succeeded; like Severn, neither man was well-rounded, but their great proficiency in one area hid their deficiencies in others, at least for a while. But that’s not enough for Rousey — hers was, after all, a “perfect” system, undermined only by a pouty, punchable face that couldn’t take the punches (“If you can't take the punches, it don't mean a thing,” singer Warren Zevon tells us in his ode to boxer Ray “Boom Boom” Mancini).
It is precisely Rousey’s lack of modesty that rescues this book from the rubbish bin of athlete autobiographies, most of which are intended to serve as dust-collecting bookends for fans who prefer owning little pieces of their idols to actually reading their tedious, ghostwritten narratives. Here, however, we are treated to the real thing — the subject of the story is blaming everyone, perhaps even the readers, for her looming irrelevance and obsolescence. It is a rare work in another important sense, given that Rousey has nothing left to promote alongside the book’s release: she has failed or least washed up across the board in all areas, except as a wife and mother. What we get, then, is one last attempt to armbar her own narrative, to make the “straight tea, sis” tap out to the force of her own juiced-up ego. I’ve read hundreds of these books, and I can state with complete confidence — in the grandiose style of Ronda Rousey, I suppose — that I’ve never read another like this. Ronda Rousey’s story is indeed Our Fight, because her many losses are not just our losses but our fault.
Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work.
