Ronda Rousey's Greatness Challenges Everything, Even How We Talk About Her

It's strange to think that 11 fights and nearly four years into her amazing MMA career, we still have no idea how to talk about Ronda Rousey.

Through five appearances in the Octagon—capped by Saturday’s 14-second destruction of Cat Zingano at UFC 184—the women’s bantamweight champion has been so dominant that all our normal buzzwords fall pathetically short.

The lasting impression is that Rousey is so far ahead of her time—not to mention her best competition—that her own peers and her own employer don’t know exactly what to make of her. She’s obviously incomparable, but we can’t stop comparing her to her male counterparts. She’s obviously unique, but so far, we’re dead set on cramming her into some mold, some prefabricated cliche.

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To that end, UFC President Dana White was happy to make Mike Tyson allusions at Saturday’s post-fight press conference. In keeping with MMA’s steadfastly oblivious relationship with the troubled former boxer, White didn’t appear to reckon that this might not be a wholly positive comparison or an awkward one to make about his first women’s champion.

"She is—without a doubt—that female version of him," White said, via MMAFighting.com’s Luke Thomas. “That's exactly what she reminds me of.”

No, she isn’t. It’s a convenient comparison but—like the rest—an incomplete one.

Rousey is likely better at MMA now than Tyson ever was at boxing, though she might lack the competition to become a similar cultural phenomenon. Her skill set is already growing and changing in a way Tyson’s never did. While his public appeal was grounded in pure violence, hers is based on technical wizardry.

Because of it, Rousey is now obviously among the very best pound-for-pound MMA fighters in the world, though even that distinction invites unfair and ultimately fruitless evaluations. Here is Ronda Rousey, presenting us with a new vision of our sport, potentially changing the direction of our shared history, and what do we do?

We argue about her fighting a dude.

The fact is, she’s too much of an iconoclast to be defined with a tool as blunt and clumsy (not to mention imaginary) as a pound-for-pound list or as stale as the ol' man-versus-woman debate. She doesn’t fit perfectly into a Friday morning “greatest of all time” retrospective. Believe me, I tried it last week and ultimately came away feeling empty about the experience.

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We can't easily categorize Rousey because she’s something completely new. She defies our often-hackneyed thinking about the sport and challenges notions of gender roles on a platform where, up until a few years ago, all of the biggest players were men.

In trying to quantify how great she is, we oftentimes take wrong turns into minimizing her, patronizing her the way UFC commentators so often do when they talk about female MMA fighters being “tough girls” or produce commercials that beat the same tired and embarrassing “easy on the eyes, hard on the face” drum.

As Deadspin.com’s Greg Howard aptly wrote on Monday (contains NSFW language), Rousey isn’t the female version of anything. She’s just the first Ronda Rousey, and that alone makes it impossible to describe her with conventional fight-game platitudes.

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“Women's mixed martial arts is a younger sport even than men's, and more immature,” Howard wrote. “We don't know exactly how good these fighters are because Rousey is the only fixed constant against which we can measure them, and she's so much better than everyone else that no one can be measured on her scale.”

Of course, all of this makes it difficult to cast Rousey in any proper historical perspective, especially when we lack the basic vocabulary to even describe her. We know she’s far and away the greatest women’s fighter we’ve ever seen, but it’s becoming increasingly difficult to say what exactly that means.

She’s been in the UFC for just 25 months, so it doesn’t seem right to lump her in with the sport’s other all-time greats, who spent years building their resumes. Yet she’s all but run out of real estate in the fledgling women’s bantamweight division. That presents everyone—UFC execs, Rousey, matchmakers, us—with a bit of a quandary.

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The fight company desperately needs her to prove she’s the big-money draw it portrays her as, or at the very least, it needs her to develop into one. Hence, perhaps, the ready but uncomfortable Tyson analogies.

Like Tyson, however, even as Rousey’s fights have become appointment viewing, they also start to feel like the kind of thing you want to watch at the local bar, rather than shell out $60 to see on pay-per-view. With final estimates on the UFC 184 buyrate still outstanding, it’s tough to even get a handle on whether large numbers of MMA fans are interested in opening their wallets to watch her fight.

If not, that obviously seems like kind of a big deal.

After watching her jet past five UFC opponents in less time than it takes to have a single five-round fight, we’re all desperate to see her challenged, to see how she responds to adversity. Frankly, you couldn't fault fight fans for wanting to save their money until such an opportunity comes along. Unfortunately, matchmakers now appear equally desperate to find Rousey a credible fight.

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With reports from Variety.com emerging that she’ll take more time off for another movie project in the coming months, there just don’t seem to be a ton of great options for her when she returns.

It's increasingly possible that she’ll spend the rest of her short fighting life mopping up second-tier UFC contenders and then waltz off to a full-time career in Hollywood, leaving us gaping and still struggling to describe exactly what we just saw.

We’d hoped that Zingano and her next few opponents might help clear that up, but chances now look slim.

At present, the only foe who stands a chance of adding anything definitive to our incomplete picture of Rousey is Invicta FC featherweight champion Cris “Cyborg” Justino, and even that bout is starting to lose its luster.

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It’s unclear if Justino will ever make her way to the Octagon, and her plan to cut to 135 pounds still seems comically long-term. Even if she does arrive in time and on weight, each passing day makes it feel less likely that a bantamweight Cyborg will stand much chance against Rousey, either.

Holly Holm, too, once seemed like she could instantly be a worthy opponent for the UFC champ. But after her less-than-overwhelming performance against Raquel Pennington last weekend, it’s clear Holm needs considerably more seasoning. She might someday be a good No. 1 contender, but—to paraphrase a recent UFC catchphrase—the time is not now.

That leaves Rousey with just a couple of fairly uninspiring choices for a next fight, whenever she returns from moviemaking to accept one of them.

A bout against Bethe Correia would be fun, if potentially even more lopsided than recent drubbings of Zingano and Alexis Davis.

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Correia is the bantamweight division’s self-made star. She effectively transformed herself from a complete unknown into public enemy No. 1 after defeating Rousey training partners Jessamyn Duke and Shayna Baszler in back-to-back 2014 appearances. Correia talks a good game and is one of the few bantamweights who hasn’t been shy about getting right up in Rousey’s face.

“I don't think she's a good champion,” Correia said last weekend, via MMAFighting.com’s Marc Raimondi. “I think she's really selfish. She just thinks about herself, about making movies, dressing well, showing up. I'm not gonna be like this, I'm gonna be a real champ. I'm gonna do something for the people. I'm gonna be the people's champ.”

In terms of providing the sort of challenge Rousey really needs, though, Correia can only fit half the bill. She’ll make things interesting prior to the bell, but she will surely be an even longer shot than Zingano or Davis once it comes time for the actual fight.

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The same is true of Jessica Eye, who reportedly told company officials after UFC 184 that she might “whup somebody” if she didn’t get the next shot at Rousey. Like Correia, she’ll bring a certain amount of intensity before her championship opportunity, but then—like Correia—she’ll take her place among Rousey’s quick and easy victories.

Either fight will be a useful exercise in padding her record and biding time until Cyborg or Holm are ready for prime time, but neither does anything to solve our current Ronda Rousey problems.

It won’t give us any better idea of where she stands in the grand scheme of things. It won’t help her build a legacy that could one day stand among the all-time greats. It won’t help the UFC escape the notion that the women’s bantamweight class is a vehicle to promote one woman and one woman only.

It won’t help us find a common language to talk about Rousey without a lot of bickering and silliness.

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If we’re serious about doing something meaningful while there still is time, it’s imperative that the organization bring Justino into the fold as soon as possible. Book that fight at bantamweight or a 140-pound catchweight or featherweight, if you have to—just get it done.

Otherwise, it’s possible Rousey’s career could one day experience the same fate as guys like Royce Gracie, Matt Hughes and Frank Shamrock. That is, great champions who lorded over the early days of their divisions but never had much competition and whose memories were eventually eclipsed by their successors.

It feels like we probably owe Rousey better than that.

In the meantime, we may be forced to simply appreciate her for what she is—even though no one can define exactly what that is.