She had to be there early for a series of live interviews with KTLA, which was interrupting its morning show to give viewers a preview of Rousey’s upcoming fight, her ninth, against a talented but relatively unknown wrestler named Sara McMann. Her roommates were still asleep when she left to begin her daily commute: thirty miles across Los Angeles to the Glendale Fighting Club, a one-story anomaly on South Brand Boulevard, which is otherwise lined with luxury-car dealerships.
She lives in a comfortably unkempt house, not far from the boardwalk, that she shares with three other female fighters-they call themselves the Four Horsewomen, in tribute to an old professional wrestling team-and a ninety-pound Argentinian hunting dog named Mochi. This February in Venice, California, it was still chilly when Rousey woke up, at four-fifteen, and made herself some eggs: spinach, turkey bacon, lots of pink Himalayan salt. “I’m the heel, I’m the antihero,” she says. commentsphere’s seething hatred of all things Ronda Rousey.” For her part, Rousey says she isn’t bothered by the evidence, online and in arenas, that many of the people who pay to watch her fight are hoping to see her lose. In 2011, the editors of an irreverent blog called CagePotato declared Rousey their “new obsession.” These days, she is so polarizing that they can joke about “the M.M.A.
In this small world, Rousey’s ascent hasn’t been uniformly celebrated. Its most important chroniclers can be found at the monomaniacal Web sites that keep track of its proliferating story lines: upsets and comebacks, crackups and busts, idle threats and infelicitous tweets. packs arenas all over the world, it still isn’t quite mainstream, which means it is only an occasional presence on “SportsCenter” or sports radio. When, recently, she submitted to a brief interview on “American Idol,” Ryan Seacrest jokingly flinched as she greeted him. Outside the cage, Rousey is genial but unapologetic about her capacity to inflict harm.
fights with a move known in judo as juji gatame, which can be painful to contemplate, let alone receive: it is a type of arm bar designed to hyperextend an opponent’s elbow, stretching ligaments, tearing the articular capsule, and even grinding away the bone if the opponent doesn’t concede quickly enough. Rousey is a former judo champion, and she won her first eight M.M.A. is the dominant company, and she has become its dominant personality, despite the fact that not long ago its president was promising never to promote a fight between women. In the sport once known as cage fighting and now known as mixed martial arts, the U.F.C. After a couple of steam baths, what remains of her weighs almost exactly a hundred and thirty-five pounds, the limit for the women’s bantamweight division of the Ultimate Fighting Championship. She wants to get bloated, so that when she eliminates salt from her diet, in the final days, her body expels all the fluid it can find. When Ronda Rousey is training for a fight, she spends a week eating nothing but salty food.