Ronda Rousey Has No Other Option but Victory

If there’s one thing you can say about Strikeforce competitor Ronda Rousey, she’s anything but cliché and she obviously didn’t study the classic 1988 sports film Bull Durham.

As Tim Robbins’ character Nuke LaLoosh makes his way through the minors, he learns and studies under experienced catcher Crash Davis, played by Kevin Costner. At one point in the movie, LaLoosh asks Davis to teach him something and so the longtime minor leaguer tells him to grab his pad and pencil and they are going to work on his interviews.

“We’ve got to play them one day at a time. I’m just happy to be here, hope I can help the ball club. I just want to give it my best shot and the good Lord willing, things will work out.”

LaLoosh remarks at how boring the comments are, but Davis says those are the kinds of interviews that are going to get him through the majors.

Well, Ronda Rousey decided from the first moment she stepped foot into MMA that she was going to break the rules. She was going to go outside the box and she wasn’t going to play nice.

Time after time, Rousey called out Tate and eventually she got her wish. The two will meet in the main event of the upcoming Strikeforce event on Showtime, the first time a women’s fight has headlined a show since Gina Carano met Cris “Cyborg” Santos in 2009.

Rousey admits that in another life Miesha Tate may have actually been a good friend, but she’s got enough friends, and unlike the film Bull Durham, she wasn’t going to spout off clichés and play by the rules. She needed an enemy and she knew exactly how to get one.

“I think that if we met under different circumstances, if things weren’t the way they were, we probably would’ve ended up being friends. I think that the person that you’re fighting, you have more in common with than anyone else in the room,” Rousey said about Tate recently.

“But I kind of created this rivalry on purpose because I had enough friends, and I really could use a few enemies. And the result of how much attention this fight’s been getting, that just proves me right.”

Rousey insists that through all the things that have been said, nothing is personal between her and Tate, but she knows why the incumbent champion is not a fan of her tactics.

“It’s not personal to me, and I understand why she doesn’t like me, why she would take it personal because I’ve been being pretty much overtly rude. I haven’t been lying or saying anything I think wasn’t true, but I’ve been saying things I wouldn’t say to people’s faces usually because it’s not polite,” Rousey stated.

“I don’t feel bad about it. She can take it personal if she wants. I don’t.”

All the talk does do something beyond hype the fight, however. It also puts the pressure back on Rousey to perform after her words have been so strong and opinionated.

In many other professional sports, players are routinely criticized for saying things like “I guarantee victory” or trash talking ahead of the big game because it gives their opponents some bulletin board material for motivation.

Rousey says that all of her chatter was with a purpose and that boils down to pressure. She wants all the pressure going into this fight to fall on her back because she has no plans of falling down.

She’s going to win, and win big.

“I need that pressure. I want to feel like I’m backed into a corner. Have you ever seen the movie Gattaca? When the one guy’s racing his brother and they swim out in the ocean, and they see which one has to stop first to swim back, and the one guy would win, and he couldn’t understand why the guy would win. He’s like, ‘Why? I don’t know why.’ And he would say that ‘the reason why is because I didn’t save anything for the trip back,’” Rousey said referencing the 1997 science fiction film.

“I’m not saving any. I don’t want to give myself an escape route. It’s okay if I lose. I want to make sure that I have no other option, so I fight as if I have no other option.”

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