Twitter Mailbag: Down goes Rousey! Down goes Rousey!

Ronda Rousey

In this week’s Twitter Mailbag, OK, a lot of you wanted to discuss Ronda Rousey and Holly Holm. That’s understandable. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered there.

But what about Diego Sanchez’s attempted featherweight revival? And wait, did Uriah Hall really compare Rousey haters to terrorists? Bro. Not cool, bro.

To ask a question of your own, fire it off to @BenFowlkesMMA.

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Rousey doesn’t have the problem of age, like Anderson Silva did. She also didn’t “just get caught,” the way Georges St-Pierre did. Instead, she got exposed by a fighter with a great game plan and an impeccable ability to attack her where she was weakest. If that reminds me of any former champion, it might be Matt Hughes.

Remember when your boy Country Breakfast got throttled by GSP in their second fight, then came back and got more of the same in the third? It was a painful passing of the torch for Hughes, but also an inevitable one, seeing as how Hughes had relied on a skill set that seemed anachronistically limited in hindsight.

Rousey could share that fate. Or she might retool and fix those holes in her game, then rise up and reclaim her title. Then we might add “like Ronda Rousey” to the list of ways champions respond to upset losses.

If it were solely up to the UFC to turn fighters into draws, we’d see a lot more fighters who are draws. By virtue of beating Rousey in a fight that millions of people saw – some of them live, some of them in the form of Vines or GIFs or weird Internet memes – Holm will get some of that superstar luster to rub off on her. She won’t get all of it, though. And we shouldn’t expect her to.

One thing Holm has going for her right now, aside from that violent KO thing, is her natural ability to be the anti-Rousey. You know, kind of like how George W. Bush ran his first presidential campaign on a platform implying that, whatever else he did, at least he wouldn’t mess around with interns like Bill Clinton did.

Those people delighting in Rousey’s fall? A lot of them are reacting to the same swagger that helped Rousey get so much attention in the first place. Holm’s soft-spoken style, and her status as the underdog hero who slayed MMA’s sneering queen, might make her at least a temporary favorite of that crowd. The question is whether Holm can hold their interest without Rousey around to offer a looming counterexample.

A lot depends on the fighter, but I think it’s usually some combination of all those things.

I remember asking Brock Lesnar, who had just told me he fought only for the money, and could take or leave the pride and glory, when he’d decide that he had enough money. He laughed and shook his head in that way he had of treating every question he didn’t really want to think about as if it were the dumbest thing he’d ever heard, and then he told me that there was no such thing as enough money. If you’re looking for something that explains the moves he’s made lately, there you go.

When you look at a guy like Sanchez, who looks to start fresh as a featherweight at UFC Fight Night 78, I think you’re seeing what happens when the same things that once propelled your career now just perpetuate it. The stubbornness and drive, the willingness to walk through all manner of physical punishment and emotional disappointment, those qualities, maybe more than any physical abilities, made Sanchez’s career what it was. And if we loved him for those things then, how do we tell him to turn them off now?

I’ve got to go with Nick Diaz. Not just because of the, uh, “medicine” he is likely to have stashed somewhere in his carry-on, but also because I’ve seen this man remove his shoes and belt at enough weigh-ins to know that he does not do it with the sense of urgency you’d like when you’re trying to catch the 6:15 to the 209.

I understand the impulse. Hall saw people using the safety and relative anonymity of the Internet to bash a friend of his, and he somewhat understandably lashed out. But the thing about using your keyboard to attack keyboard warriors is that you may be entering a domain where you are unsuited for the combat that follows.

For example, not only did Hall call fans terrorists just days after a horrific attack by actual terrorists (he’s since edited that word out), he also called one fan who responded negatively to that approach “retardid,” before imploring him to “come to cali so I can smack you like my b-tch.”

Yeah, not a great look. Also? I’m pretty sure it affected the online cascade of Rousey hate not at all.

If you’re looking for a great way to let MMA fans know whether spelling and punctuation are important to you, by all means, get on the Web and pwn some fools. Just maybe take the time to write a second draft before posting.

We discussed this a little on this week’s episode of the Co-Main Event podcast, but it’s true that the championship pressure is not distributed equally among every person with a UFC belt. Then again, neither is the money.

When we talk about the pressure on Rousey, though, we’re not just talking about the pressure of owning and defending a UFC title. We’re mostly talking about the pressure of being one of the UFC’s precious few stars. The UFC asks an awful lot of fighters like Rousey and Conor McGregor, because it sees them as the ticket into the mainstream. If you wear those tickets out through overuse, however, it won’t help you much to have had them once.

First of all, I wouldn’t say it’s so much outrage as distaste. People who are that happy about something bad happening to someone else have perhaps told us more than they meant to about themselves.

But see, an interesting thing happened over the course of those three sentences you wrote. You started out talking about people – Ronda, Conor, and Floyd, all big enough names to need only one of them – and then you ended talking about a character archetype. A “heel” is a pro wrestling bad guy. It’s also a person playing a role. So when you heap scorn upon the heel, you’re just playing along with the show. Both the heel and the people booing him (hopefully) know it isn’t real.

It’s different in pro fighting, where no one’s playing a character so much as they are amplifying their existing personality. Then they have to go home and keep being that person with that name.

And that’s the thing I think some fans have forgotten in their rush to celebrate the first loss of Rousey’s pro career. I understand the impulse to have fun with it, even rub it in a little. Rousey earned some of that with the arrogance she projected while she was on top, not to mention her treatment of others trying to climb up there.

But at a certain point you have to remind yourself that while Rousey has made herself into something of a media commodity, and been paid well for it, she’s also a person. And she’s a person who, in the process of helping herself, has done a lot for this sport.

Then she lost exactly one fight. One. It’s cool to point out how the mighty have fallen and all, but maybe we don’t need to make it a full-time job.

Paige VanZant is up against an interesting test in Rose Namajunas. If she wins that, not only does her case for a title shot get stronger, she also gets high enough in the ranks that pretty soon she’ll run out of appropriate opponents.

Right now, that might be a terrible thing for the 21-year-old PVZ. If she fights champ Joanna Jedrzejczyk soon, before she has a chance to get more experience and more overall skill, VanZant could very well catch a serious beatdown. Maybe even the kind of beatdown that ruins a young fighter.

How about Jackson-Winkeljohn’s? They have a reputation for churning out great female fighters. Why, just look at Holly Hol-ohhhhhhh right. Nevermind. Rousey might not be welcome there right now.

In that case, I’d recommend Rousey head north, away from the L.A. lifestyle with all its distractions. She needs to get a little “Rocky IV” for this rematch, if you know what I’m saying. Maybe run around and chop wood in the Sierra Nevada mountains with Jake Shields. Lift giant piles of rocks with the Diaz brothers. Most importantly, go up and drill her wrestling with the crew at AKA.

Assuming the rematch happens some time within the next 12 months, I doubt Rousey will be able to close the gap in pure striking ability. Holm was a much better boxer than Rousey last Saturday, and she’ll still be better than her by, say, July.

Rousey’s submission game is her best chance to win that fight, but she needs more ways to get it there than simply punching her way into the clinch. She also may or may not need more experience against southpaws. If she gets that experience in a Soviet barn while Tony Burton shouts encouragement, even better.

Ben Fowlkes is MMAjunkie and USA TODAY’s MMA columnist. Follow him on Twitter at @BenFowlkesMMA. Twitter Mailbag appears every Thursday on MMAjunkie.