So that’s what writing a check your ass (or face) can’t cash looks like.
Go Amanda. Too bad you’ll never get paid $3 million. That’s what you get for not being anyone’s “sweetheart”, I guess. But at least you got to do something a lot of fighters have been itching to do from the moment Rousey started talking that smack.
Saw most of it on ESPN. Yeesh. Let’s just say that if a man did to Rousey what Nunes did, he’d be arrested.
Yeah, that was totally out of line. 
Not sure what to think. Mainly I’m still trying to understand how someone who got thoroughly clobbered 11 or 13 months ago (I forget which) and hasn’t seen any action since gets $3 million, while the flippin’ defending champion gets $100,000. Usually when someone brings up the issue of pay disparity in women’s sports, the gripe is that both sides are underpaid.
Seriously, if that was out of line, tell me and I won’t do it again. I want what’s best for everyone here.
“Help me!”
Don’t try to outbox a boxer. Rhoda didn’t learn that last time, and proved it this time. Christ, who the hell is her couch? The couch did a shit job. Me thinks Rhonda is history. She has become a dinosaur that can’t evolve.
Simple. Rousey was the draw and she earned her money by attracting paying customers to watch the fight. There would have been little interest (nor money to be made) in a fight between Amanda Nunez and some other unknown or little known opponent.
Re her coach, I’ve read that Ronda’s mother has been trying to get Ronda to change coaches but Ronda has refused.
I have no idea why she hasn’t spent the last year training to box. Just like with Holly Holm she had absolutely no defense. She seems to think she can just plow her way in, absorb head shots without damage, and then bring down and submit her opponent through grappling. I’d be willing to bet she finally knows better now.
If only she’d had direct deposit, she wouldn’t have needed to show up for the beating.
She obviously has been training. She has the right posture, the right feet, the well-trained core- she just happens to have decided to fight an opponent miles ahead.
Her ego probably didn’t let her see that. And the coaches are probably just a bunch of yes-men who liked a payday better than a job well done. But she has clearly been training.
Yes, she’s been training in the sense that she’s been working on her body. I saw zero evidence that she’d gotten any training at all on how to box, or even how to defend herself against a boxer. She clearly knows nothing about ring strategy, or how to slip punches, or how to use her guard to ward off blows, or how to punch effectively herself. She just wales in wide open with no attempt whatever to avoid punches, hoping to strike a punch herself effective enough to stun her opponent long enough to be taken to the ground, or to get close enough to effect a takedown despite the flurry of blows raining down on her head as she attempts to do so.
Apart from her physical characteristics I’d be curious to know what evidence you see that would indicate she’s had any training in how to box at all.
Well, look at the Holms fight: open guard, thinking wrongly that she would take the offensive. You cannot say that’s the same in the Nunes fight: Rousey kept a very high guard, protecting her head while trying to use her reach, with a perfectly nice looking classic defensive stance, if a bit stiff. There was nothing wrong with either her gameplan nor her basic posture- she was just ridiculously outclassed by an opponent way faster and stronger.
Okay, thanks. I’ll take a look at both fights tomorrow to see if I can spot what you’re talking about.
She’s finished. Unless she learns only to defend in a boxing stance and start grappling. The training people spoke about above, meant fuck all since she went in to attack immediately.
Roussey’s strategy was always pretty simple - let them charge at me, take a shot, lock them up, trip/throw them, armbar.
Her success came from the fact that her throws are near perfect and she can get an armbar from pretty much any position in a half a heartbeat.
Holms beat her because Holms refused to play that game. She stayed outside and used angles and a variety of strikes to prevent the clinch. It didn’t take long before Ronda had no idea what to do and started barging across the cage like a blinded boar.
I disagree with your assertion that Roussey " [protected] her head while trying to use her reach." Roussey kept her hands up, sure, but the guard was loose and ineffective to say the least. The first straight Nunez threw went right between her hands like they weren’t there. Her stance and posture may have looked fine but that’s all it was - looks.
As to trying to use her reach… Nunez has a 69 inch reach, Rousey has a 68 inch reach. I’m not sure how you think she was trying (or even supposed to try) to use a reach disadvantage - small though it is.
At the core Roussey’s problem is that she was in a wholly non-striking discipline and, as a result, hates being hit. She doesn’t know how to weather it and can’t deal.
She took a year off and learned some striking but you can’t go from 0 to elite in 13 months (and how much of that time was just duct-taping her shattered ego to the point that she could train?)
If she’d gone to Ludwig or Jackson MMA then she may have been more competitive but a lack of understanding of the fundamentals coupled with disorientation as soon as someone smacks her meant she was always destined to lose so long as Nunez didn’t work to Roussey’s strength.
Her career is, I think done. There will be no Hollywood since her film “career” was built around an image that has been utterly shattered and a deflated aura of awesomeness.
The WWE might still take her - I mean they took in Ken Shamrock - but her near-assured ascendency is no longer likely.
Exactly.
I think that what a lot of people forget, when watching elite-level athletes, is just how good they are, even when they look bad.
This season, Chicago Cubs outfielder Jason Heyward had an incredibly bad year at the plate. In 142 regular-season games, Heyward batted .230/.306/.325. That’s an OPS+ of 70, and is about as bad a season as you can have and still remain in the Major Leagues. Offensively, he was basically a replacement-level player.
But Heyward, even when he plays like this, is still better at baseball than almost everyone else in the world. He’s better than any guy you ever played with in school or in college; he’s better than the guy on your beer league who everyone thinks is a really good player; and he’s better than most of the professional baseball players playing a A and AA and AAA level. He is an elite athlete, even if he spent season 2016 barely able to hit anything more than the occasional single.
It’s the same with Rousey in the ring against Nunes. The fact that she was hammered by a superior opponent doesn’t change the fact that she’s among the absolute best in the world at what she does. And at that level, having a small but noticeable weakness makes you incredibly vulnerable, because the people you’re facing are so fucking awesome at what they do.
Rousey has been focusing on her boxing skills ever since her loss to Holm. You can find quite a few stories about it online, and you could see some of it in this fight. I don’t sit in on her sessions, but i’ll bet she worked her ass off trying to improve her boxing skills, and i’d wager that she’s a better boxer now than she was a year ago. And i’m also sure that, in a boxing match against 99 percent of the world’s population, she would absolutely annihilate them, because she’s an elite-level athlete and an elite-level fighter.
But if she spent 24 hours a day, every day, since her fight against Holm, doing nothing but boxing training, she was still very unlikely to be able to match another elite-level athlete and elite-level fighter who has spent much of her life as a boxer. You simply can’t just catch up like that, not at this level.
Yes, but that’s what I’m saying. There was no tactic that would have worked. Rousey was just plain inferior.
Fair enough. I assumed that Rousey would have a longer reach, but I guess that that high guard makes no sense if she doesn’t.
Shit if I had lost the eye of the tiger and knew my fighting career was over I’d still take that last ass whooping for the $3 Million payday.
I think Ronda’s earlier opponents had just never encountered someone with such technical skill in the art of take-downs and submissions. Ronda was so deceptive and so fast in terms of closing in, scoring the take-down (usually painful ones at that), and quick submissions. She also physically matched up well against some of her opponents and didn’t really respect their striking power. Holm was the first opponent to make Rousey pay on her feet for closing in. She kept the distance between herself and Rousey, and unless she can get close, she can’t score those devastating take-downs. Nunes just made that disadvantage even more apparent. Ronda’s game has been exposed and it’s a blue-print that any serious striker will exploit in the future.
Has been an issue for decades on the boxing side and at times on other one-on-one match sports, the promoters’ “franchise” fighter gets the big cash even when humbled and even when the other fighter’s just as much a champ.
Well, from the results of this fight, except for missing out on the $3M payday the couch looks ever more like it would have been a saner choice for spending the night.
It’s worth noting Amanda Nunes isn’t an elite level striker. She’s Brazilian and has a pretty typical background for a Brazlian MMA fighter–her first martial art was BJJ, and she’s also fairly accomplished in Judo (brown belt–so not on the Rousey level in Judo.) She was able to out box Rousey largely because Rousey really is a terrible boxer and because Amanda has recognized the trend that you need some “base level” of boxing skills in MMA to be well rounded, and she’s worked on it for 4 years.
Rousey actually claimed, both before and after her loss to Holm, that she had spent a lot of time with her boxing coach, and she says she did the same before this fight with Nunes. I think her boxing coach is either extremely bad, that after 1.5+ years of what she claims was intensive training, and she still looks so poor, or Ronda doesn’t listen/follow her boxing coach’s strategy lessons.
Against a legitimate professional boxer, like Holly Holms in a boxing match, Nunes would likely be destroyed. But Nunes has fought twice in a row now “unevolved” female MMA stars who rely on judo and BJJ and have no striking or strike defense skills whatsoever (Tate and Rousey), and Nunes is smart enough to realize “I may be trained in grappling myself, but they are completely terrible in boxing, so if I can have a boxing match with them I’d much rather do that than grapple with them.” I think even before she started heavy working on formal boxing training, it also helped that Nunes is just a tough woman–she’s got some of the street brawler in her and likes punching and doesn’t seem to mind being punched (Rousey obviously very much does), if you watch some of Nunes old fights or even her losses it’s obvious she’s unrefined at striking but she has that “taste” for hitting and being hit, and that’s extremely important to have as a character trait or all the scientific boxing training in the world ain’t gonna do shit for you.
And yeah, fighting sports have always based purse largely on PPV money. Rousey being on the card immediately guaranteed high PPV buys. A star that is known to be able to command high PPV buys will command much higher guaranteed pay, and it’s worth mentioning that unlike boxing where various regulatory bodies require total pay be disclosed, UFC doesn’t disclose its “non-guaranteed” pay. Rousey likely made far more than the $3m being reported, $3m was just her base/guaranteed pay (which is usually fairly low in UFC anyway, $3m guaranteed tied McGregor for the highest guarantee ever in a UFC fight.) But Rousey also got a portion of the PPV buys as well, and the share you get is usually based on where your fight is on the card and whether you win or lose.
Take Brock Lesnar’s brief (and PED filled) return to UFC for UFC 200. Lesnar got a guarantee of $2.5m, which at that point was the highest ever guarantee. This was based off of the fact Lesnar is a huge draw, but hadn’t fought in UFC in years. But some of his old cards were among the highest PPV draws of all time, there’s only been 14 UFC PPVs out of their 200+ to draw over 1,000,000 buys. Lesnar was on several of them (UFC 100, UFC 116, UFC 121, UFC 91.) Likewise, UFC 200 drew just over 1,000,000 buys, so clearly Lesnar was still a major draw (and his fight with Hunt wasn’t even billed as main event.) In the WWE, for something like a year the WWE saw higher fan interest when Lesnar was advertised as being on a PPV, and would see WWE Network new subs spike before a Lesnar match. While Dana White has expressed disdain from the worked affair that is professional wrestling, he’s an astute businessman who knows a draw is a draw, and that Lesnar on a UFC card would likely get carry over PPV buys from WWE fans who normally never watch UFC (this is what actually happened when Lesnar had his first run in UFC, a lot of his fan base was in fact due to WWE fans.)
But anyway, boxing and MMA pay days are based largely on your drawing power, not who is “most deserving.” A champion not receiving the highest pay check isn’t at all unusual.
Sure there was but it would have required something that is completely outside of Rousey’s character - apparent disloyalty.
Rousey’s longtime couch (lol) is Edmund Tarverdyan. He was an unknown nobody before Rousey and will return to that status now that Rousey is done. But he did take her from her 1st fight up to the championship and through multiple defenses.
Prior to Holy Holms every Rousey fight went one of two ways 1)Rousey charges in, gets hit sinks the clinch drops the opponent and applies an armbar or 2)The opponent rushes in, Rousey maybe gets hit, Rousey sinks the clinch, drops them and applies an armbar.
Her striking was never an issue because no opponent really made it one. Holy Holms didn’t fall for the trap of rushing in and avoided when Rousey charged. That’s how Holms beat her. She fought from the outside in order to avoid the clinch and used angles and footwork to avoid the charge.
Rousey lost because, as was said earlier, she was superhumanly good at one thing and useless at everything else.
What she should have done was ditched Tarverdyan (even for 6-8 months) and gone to Jackson/Winklejohn, RufusSport or Duane Ludwig - I’d have included ATT but since that’s where Nunez trains I doubt it would have worked out lol. Here’s what that would have done for her.
She would have learned a deeper understanding of the fundamentals of offense. If you don’t understand offense then you have no defense and no counter. I, personally, didn’t think that her guard looked terribly practiced and she lost her stance about one punch into it.
Here is a strategy that would have - potentially - worked. Run. Run, run and run. Frustrate Nunez, make Nunez chase. If Nunez did get in then cover up behind shoulders and arms. When Nunez threw to the body to drop the guard clinch and go for the throw and the finish. If that fails then separate and run again.
Alternately she could have feinted the charge, drawn out a counter and ducked into the clinch.
But both of these require a good enough understanding of the coming offense to defend it properly.
Any of the three camps that I mentioned could have given her that chance (or an even better plan) but Tarvardyan couldn’t.
Nunez is beatable and really hasn’t beaten many of note and this was a winnable fight for Rousey if loyalty hadn’t interfered with proper choice of camp.
She’ll never be a K-1 class striker but she could have learned enough to create space to do what she is the best at.
That’s because pure judo is - rightly - largely unused in MMA because pure judo does not train someone for getting punched in the teeth.
Roussey has never had a terribly good chin but it has always been good enough to eat the one or two shots that she’d take while she clinched. From there her opponents had no idea how to defend because they didn’t understand what they were defending against.
She was deceptive at all. She would charge forward or her opponent would. But her throws came like lightning and her armbars are beyond description in terms of speed and positions from which they can be achieved.
Everyone in MMA knows how to defend an armbar but hers were something other.
Rousey is a big girl fighting at 135, you’re right. She didn’t respect the striking because she knew all she needed to do was take a shot and then do her thing. Even if her bell got rung she could work while clearing her head and she was able to avoid damage once she clinched.
Holms simply chose not to co-operate.
Against Nunez Rousey tried her bully routine again (I don’t think she knows any different) and when that first straight right came straight into her face she got shook - mentally more than physically. The next dozen or so shots shook her physically but she was already beaten.
I disagree with everyone that says she walked in beaten. She looked no different, to me, during the walk-in and staredown than she has in every other fight.
But her mental fortitude lacked the backing it used to have and once it was challenged it shattered. I think she walked in as confident as she ever was but, unlike against Holm, it took nothing at all to break her.
Truly, I think Herb Dean stopped the fight early. Most other fighters would have had to take more of a beating before the ref stepped in to protect. I’m not saying that it was a bad stoppage per se but I can point to a hundred fights that Herb Dean has reffed that went farther even though one fighter had taken comparable or worse damage.
It was protection straight up.