Trading Shots: After Rousey's latest win, searching for right mix of praise and perspective

Ronda Rousey

In this week’s Trading Shots, MMAjunkie columnist Ben Fowlkes and retired UFC and WEC fighter Danny Downes take a look at the reaction to Ronda Rousey’s dominant victory at UFC 190, and struggle to cut through the hyperbole that followed yet another first-round finish.

Fowlkes: Let’s get the obvious stuff out of the way first, Danny. UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey is clearly the greatest female fighter in the (admittedly brief) history of women’s MMA. She’s a special athlete and a charismatic figure, not to mention an invaluable treasure for the organization that, prior to her arrival, had no use for women unless they were wearing bikinis and holding up a sign to tell us what round it was.

She’s a pioneer, in other words, and a very important one. But am I the only one who feels like we’re having a hard time trying to understand the phenomenon of Ronda Rousey, perhaps because we’re so busy trying to quantify her impact in terms of pay-per-view sales or Google searches?

Rousey knocked out an 18-1 underdog who we all knew had zero chance to beat her. Yes, it was something to see, but it wasn’t exactly unexpected. How do you put this win in the proper perspective?

Downes: I’m not so sure we can. Rousey is an incredible athlete, and she’s cleaned out the division. We’re starting to run out of superlatives to describe what she can do. Bethe Correia did a good job of promoting the fight, but this main event was basically sold with the tagline: “How badly will Rousey hurt her opponent this time?”

Rousey beat an 18-1 underdog. Where do we go from there? There wasn’t much to the fight, so we have to make it about everything that’s not the fight. She doesn’t appear to have any peers, so we have to place her in a different context. That’s why there’s that talk about Google searches and tweets from David Spade. This sport doesn’t have many stars or people that make news outside the MMA bubble. So when that person competes every few months, we try to squeeze everything we can from that star power.

I think the best way to put Rousey in perspective is that she still keeps it interesting. People want to watch her fight even when they think it will be a complete blowout. There was talk about Conor McGregor being overexposed. You never really hear that about Rousey, though. You can’t quantify that, but it says a lot more than Google searches, don’t you think?

Fowlkes: That’s a fair point, especially after an undercard peppered with so many Rousey-centric TV commercials that it almost felt like an experiment in the art of overexposure. A big part of it, I think, is that Rousey stands for something greater than herself. Take, for instance, her comments about her own physique in a pre-fight episode of the UFC’s “Embedded” series:

“When people try to say my body looks masculine or something like that, I’m like, listen, just because my body was developed for a purpose other than f-cking millionaires doesn’t mean it’s masculine. I think it’s femininely bad-ass as f-ck, because there’s not a single muscle on my body that isn’t for a purpose, because I’m not a do-nothing b-tch.”

That’s not just some fighter talking there. That’s a feminist icon in the making. That’s someone using her platform to deliver a valuable, important message to a culture that desperately needs to hear it. It’s in moments like these that you start to feel like Rousey is someone who is actually, tangibly positively influencing the lives of her fans, and not just in that bland, you-inspired-me-to-chase-my-dreams sense. How many UFC champions can you say that about right now?

In that sense, Rousey feels like an important cultural figure rather than just a really good fighter, and that sort of impact is always going to be difficult to measure (not that we’ll stop trying). At the same time, while Joe Rogan was busy gushing over her in the post-fight interview, a nagging voice in the back of my head kept saying, “We realize she just beat up a person who everyone knew she was going to beat up, right?”

I’m not trying to take anything away from Rousey. She can only beat who the UFC gives her, and the UFC only got around to giving her Correia because Rousey had beaten everyone else. But are we not in danger of making too much out of what was, essentially, an epic squash match?

Downes: You’re asking us to pump the brakes, but you’re willing to name her a feminist icon? Seems a bit contradictory.

Rousey has certainly transcended the sport, and while I don’t want to rain on the parade, we do have to wonder where else she can go. She’s been in movies and has made appearances on late night talk shows. She’s been covered by Rolling Stone and other mainstream publications. She’s still a fighter, though. That’s what has given her fame, and sustains it. Keeping that in mind, how long can she keep our interest without viable challengers?

We hear the comparisons to Mike Tyson, but Tyson self-destructed.  We’ve seen what Jon Jones has done to himself, but at least he was challenged once by Alexander Gustafsson. I suppose it’s natural for us to wait for the fall. We find it hard to imagine someone this dominant, this successful, can make it last. What’s her VH1 documentary going to look like?

That’s not to say Rousey hasn’t had difficulties getting to this point, but she seems so far above competition that it’s hard for people to understand.

Every great athlete needs a rival. Rousey doesn’t have one. Miesha Tate is the closest right now, but what happens if Rousey finishes her for a third time? Do people lose interest? Does it diminish what she’s already accomplished?

Fowlkes: Whatever interest there is in a third fight between Rousey and Tate, it doesn’t stem from any realistic hope that it will be especially competitive. What will probably happen is that Tate will once again prove herself to be more resilient than Rousey’s other opponents without ever being much of a threat, and then she’ll get submitted or knocked out. Once that’s done, we’ll all go through the familiar motions of anointing Rousey the best ever all over again, and all for doing what she’s already done.

That’s the problem for Rousey right now. There’s no way to make any case for greatness beyond the one she’s already made – which is pretty damn solid – unless she steps up to the “Cyborg” challenge.

We all know that Cristiane Justino is the only opponent who might matter at this point. UFC executives can pretend that they’ll only make that fight if Justino can get down to 135 pounds, but I get the sense that they’re more concerned with wringing every cent out of Rousey’s reign of terror over the current bantamweight class before they’ll risk her against the woman who punched Gina Carano into exile.

One thing working in Rousey’s favor is that her stardom is built on her appeal to non-fight fans. Remember when Rogan and UFC President Dana White yelled at each other about all the women and young girls who’d be tuning in to see Rousey fight at UFC 190? Even though the UFC then asked those people to sit through a seven-fight main card that dragged at times, I think there probably was a notably different audience for this event.

What that means is, there were probably a lot of people who watched Rousey vs. Correia and saw it as one undefeated fighter against another. They might not have known or cared that Correia’s eventual destruction was basically a foregone conclusion.

Those people will tune in again when Rousey fights Tate. After that, if she ends up meeting someone like Holly Holm, who would almost certainly be billed as the “toughest test of Rousey’s career,” it’ll be the same thing.

That’s the power of Rousey’s stardom, and I have an easier time imagining her getting bored of it than throwing it all away.

If Rousey wants to make a bunch of money and film a bunch of movies and strut down a bunch of red carpets in between barely competitive fights, she can keep doing that for the foreseeable future. If she wants to cement herself as a great among greats, however, she needs a challenge she might not be universally expected to run through in advance. And for that, she’ll need to travel the road that runs directly through a little place called Cyborgtown (not an actual place).

Downes: I would have dubbed it Cyborg City, but the point still stands. Rousey has accomplished a lot, but that’s the only compelling fight. Justino has been rightly criticized for her previous performance-enhancing drug use, but she still casts a shadow. We know that because we bring her up after every Rousey fight.

Rousey still holds all the cards, but I would guess that the competitor in her wants to eliminate any possible doubt that she’d win that fight. Holm still needs some developing, but the well of possible contenders seems to be dry.

We’ve talked about how competition from Bellator has made the UFC better, and the same principle applies to Rousey. She hasn’t fallen off, but she needs a viable rival to elevate her game. She also needs a viable rival to maintain interest, and no, hypotheticals about her fighting Floyd Mayweather Jr. don’t count. We may not know how much longer Rousey plans to compete. We don’t know if we’ll ever be satisfied with her accomplishments. I just know we should admire greatness while we can.

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Danny Downes, a retired UFC and WEC fighter, is an MMAjunkie contributor who also writes for UFC.com and UFC 360. Follow them on twitter at @benfowlkesMMA and @dannyboydownes.