The violent fall of a great American sports star

Ronda Rousey’s name doesn’t hit as hard on this side of the Pond. In America, however, she’s one of the most significant sports personalities of the 21st century. Not only was she the first female superstar of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), the world’s biggest mixed martial arts (MMA) league, but she was also a key name – possibly the key name – in the increasing mainstream prominence of women’s sport. 

Rousey’s undefeated streak as UFC champion, between December 2012 and November 2015, made women’s MMA an attraction. Rousey headlined her debut UFC pay-per-view event, which attracted 450,000 paying viewers. For her final UFC fight just three years later, she drew 1.1 million pay-per-view viewers and a record 18,000-strong Las Vegas crowd. “I ushered MMA into a new era,” Rousey writes, “where it was understood that women not only deserved a spot on the fight card, but atop it.”

But as she describes in her new autobiography, Our Fight, when she lost her title to Holly Holm in 2015, her fighting career was all but over. The result of that defeat was more than a mouthful of loosened teeth; it struck her as a life-changing catastrophe. She describes days of sobbing, hiding away while paparazzi lie in wait outside, and thoughts of suicide. She had been the champion, she writes – “But now, without that, I was nothing.” (She adds, a little over-dramatically: “At least when you’re dead you don’t have to feel how much it hurts.”) Rousey made a comeback attempt in December 2016, and was decisively beaten in 48 seconds by Amanda Nunes. She was clearly finished as a fighter.

Our Fight is Rousey’s second autobiography, following the 2015 best-seller My Fight, Your Fight. The first book followed her troubled childhood and journey to UFC glory and fame, from the perspective of a still-undefeated champion. Our Fight, by contrast, begins with her loss to Holm. It’s a book on the defensive. Rousey doesn’t make excuses, but seeks to explain the reasons for losing: even a dodgy mouthguard takes some of the blame. At the time, there was a feeling among some UFC viewers that Rousey had gone into the Holm fight too arrogantly, and that Holm exposed the holes in her game. But Rousey reveals the physical and mental toll on her at the time: the grind of near-daily concussions, repeated injuries, dehydrating herself to the point of agony to make weight.

Our Fight details Rousey’s battle to overcome the loss, but it’s also about combative relationships with toxic coaches; the weight of self-imposed expectation; and her segue, after her UFC defeat, into wrestling, with World Wrestling Entertainment, or WWE. She touches on her own problematic behaviour, but without specificities, namely that she has been accused of transphobia for taking shots at transgender MMA fighter Fallon Fox – “She can try hormones, chop her pecker off, but it’s still the same bone structure a man has” – and was criticised for sharing a conspiracy video about the Sandy Hook school shooting. “I believe I’m a good person capable of doing some dumb s--- at times,” she writes here, but leaves it at that.