Rowdy Rousey: Ronda Rousey's Fight to the Top - Softcover

Straka, Mike

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1629372390 ISBN 13: 9781629372396

Verlag: TRIUMPH BOOKS, 2015

Inhaltsangabe

Already a superstar in the MMA and entertainment worlds, Ronda Rousey's devastating 34-second KO of Bethe Correia vaulted her into the mainstream like never before. From her undefeated exploits in The Octagon to appearing on the cover of Sports Illustrated to starring in blockbuster film Furious 7, Rousey is the preeminent combination of athletic and pop culture stardom. Rowdy Rousey: Ronda Rousey's Fight to the Top is the ultimate tribute to this multi-talented powerhouse. Including nearly 100 full-color photographs, fans are provided a glimpse into this star's life - from her days as a young Judo champion at the Olympics to her ascent to the top of MMA as the UFC champion. This keepsake also explores Rousey's vast success outside of the ring through acting, modeling and interacting with her great fans, and looks ahead to her upcoming film roles and future UFC blockbuster fights.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Mike Straka is the host of MMA Noise on LouderNoiseTV, and is a veteran journalist and producer of Fox, CBS, ABC, Privcap Media, Spike TV, AXS-TV and UFC.com. Chael Sonnen is a retired mixed martial artist who now works as an MMA analyst for ESPN. He lives in West Linn, Oregon.

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Rowdy Rousey

By Mike Straka

Triumph Books

Copyright © 2015 Triumph Books LLC
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-62937-239-6

Contents

Foreword by Chael Sonnen, 
Introduction: Interviewing the Baddest Woman on the Planet, 
1. The Champ Is Here, 
2. Unfinished Business, 
3. Growing Up Rousey, 
4. Building Women's MMA, 
5. Ronda Goes to Hollywood, 
6. Ronda in Her Own Words, 
Acknowledgments, 

CHAPTER 1

The Champ Is Here

"I'm not in this world to live up to your expectations, and you're not in this world to live up to mine.

— Bruce Lee

Ronda Rousey is an undefeated mixed martial arts fighter competing in the UFC women's bantamweight division and a former Olympic judoka, taking home bronze for the United States in 2008 at the Beijing Games.

By the time Rousey got to the UFC, she was already the Strikeforce women's bantamweight champion, and her reputation for incredible athleticism and quick stoppages of opponents preceded her.

Mixed martial arts fans don't watch to see how Ronda will win, they watch to see how fast she will win.

As of this writing, Rousey had 12 professional fights and has only gone past the first round once, in a rematch with Miesha Tate in December of 2013. She won that fight via armbar submission at 54 seconds of the third round. Rousey's last three title defenses are the most impressive times in UFC title fight history, clocking in at 14 seconds (Alexis Davis), 16 seconds (Cat Zingano), and 34 seconds (Bethe Correia) respectively.

A devastating submission specialist, Rousey has a patented armbar that she has perfected after more than two decades of elite judo training. "The Arm Collector" is another popular nickname for the professional MMA fighter, but she co-opted her "Rowdy" nickname from the late professional wrestler "Rowdy" Roddy Piper. She even dedicated her 12th win and sixth title defense to Piper, who died suddenly one day before her title fight against Bethe Correia in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.

In 2014, she won the ESPY for Best Female Athlete and in 2015 received the ESPY for Best Fighter, beating out the vaunted Floyd Mayweather, Jr. for the honor. Sports Illustrated has named her Most Dominant Athlete, New Yorker magazine calls her the "most bankable star in MMA," and even rapper Eminem is a fan, calling her "slaughterhouse in a blouse" in his song "Shady XV."

She has been featured on the cover of ESPN the Magazine's Body Issue and in Maxim, with the caption "Badass & Blonde." She's also appeared in The Expendables 3, Furious 7, and the Entourage movie.

There are only a handful of successful MMA crossover stars, and for the majority of them, it took several more years to cross over than it did Rousey. Fighters who have starred in movies or episodic television, like Chuck Liddell, Gina Carano, Randy Couture, Cung Le, and recently Josh Thomson, have all been around the professional fight game a lot longer than Rousey, but none of them would begrudge her quick ascent to mainstream stardom.

She's earned it.

In 2012, the celebrity news website TMZ caught up with UFC president Dana White outside the famous Mr. Chow's restaurant in Beverly Hills. TMZ asked White when he would have women fighting in the UFC, and he responded, "Never."

White never said that women were not worthy or good enough to compete in the UFC — instead, his position was that there wasn't enough depth in the women's divisions to sustain fan interest.

And then Ronda won the belt, and White had little choice but to recant his stance. It was as if Rousey willed him to do it all on her own, and to hear him tell it, she did.

"Ronda Rousey converted me," White told Breitbart Sports. "In the beginning I was trying to sell men fighting on TV, which was tough. Now we're going to try to sell women?" It's an understandable dilemma to be sure. After all, New York still hasn't sanctioned professional MMA, the lone holdout state in the country. Imagine that! Madison Square Garden is the most famous fighting arena in the world, and Ronda Rousey can't fight there. That's got to be the saddest line in sports journalism ever written.

Luckily for White, Rousey does a pretty good job of not only selling herself, but selling women's fighting, period. While being called the "most dominant athlete in any sport" is nice and all, leaving a legacy, and literally building an industry for women competitors in mixed martial arts, is something Rousey has set her mind to as she looks to her future after fighting.

That's not to say there's no place for women fighters outside of the UFC. World Series of Fighting, Bellator, and Invicta FC are all viable options for professional women's MMA — if not feeder leagues for the UFC — but what Rousey has done for women fighters goes well beyond livelihoods. More importantly, when girls look at their parents and say they want to be a mixed martial arts competitor, they may find them not so steadfast against the notion.

Rousey has made fighting acceptable for women.

She has proved to the most ardent critics of MMA (not even just women's MMA) that fighting is a technical skill acquired only after years of rigorous training.

On August 6, 2010, Ronda tried mixed martial arts for the first time.

It was an amateur event in Oxnard, California, in Combat Fight League's Ground Zero event. Rousey wasn't too sure what to expect, or even if her judo training would help in the fight, but she was determined to win. Little did she know she had zero cause to doubt herself. In just 23 seconds, Ronda had her answer. Her opponent Hayden Munoz threw a left kick to Ronda's right thigh. Ronda caught the kick, and attacked for a takedown. She quickly got on top of Munoz and maneuvered for an armbar. Munoz tapped (a tap is a signal that the fighter concedes victory to one's opponent), and that was that.

Rousey began training her striking (stand-up fighting) under renowned coach Edmond Tarverdyan at Glendale Fighting Club shortly before turning professional, and in her first pro bout her coach told her to use her judo to win. It wasn't that Edmond wasn't confident in Ronda's striking, it was more a lesson in "if it ain't broke, don't fix it."

That fight took place in the King of the Cage promotion on March 27, 2011, in Tarzana, California. Ronda submitted her opponent in 25 seconds this time, with another armbar. In her first 11 fights as an amateur and a pro, Rousey used an armbar to submit all of her opponents, all in the first round, eight of them in under a minute.

Word of Rousey's dominance spread like wildfire among MMA fans.

Mixed martial arts is the first international sport born in the Internet era, and it was the Internet that kept it alive, even as legislators had it banned in the 1990s. That story has been well documented, but when Zuffa (Lorenzo and Frank Fertitta, Dana White) bought the UFC, the sport was pretty much an underground obsession. It took tens of millions of dollars and then, even after being $40 million in the red, they still funded The Ultimate Fighter on Spike TV, which was a time buy (meaning Zuffa not only paid for the production but also the air time). It was a fight between Forrest Griffin and Stephan Bonnar, live on Spike TV in 2006, that is widely credited for saving the UFC and the sport of mixed martial arts, as millions of people watched the fight, with more and more tuning in as the two went to war on national television. People were calling their friends, imploring...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: TRIUMPH BOOKS
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2015
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1629372390
• ISBN 13: 9781629372396
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 128
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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