Clearly there was a lot of media "hype" around Ronda Rousey. Some of it was justified, especially when she first came onto the scene and probably right up through to the second fight with Miesha Tate., but around that time some of the coverage was starting to feel overblown.
It's not hard to see a reason for that. It had been a long, long time since there'd been a readily-marketable female combat star, one that could be promoted in the mainstream media. There was a tremendous pent-up demand for such a figure and Ronda filled the bill perfectly. She was blonde and pretty, a far more sassy and compelling interview than most sports figures and she seemed to be having a blast with it, which just made people want to give her more exposure and say more things about her. Plus, you had Dana White & Joe Rogan, two guys not exactly known for restrained, measured comment jumping on board with things like "she could beat Floyd" and "greatest of all time" etc. They didn't do her any favours by not keeping their rhetoric down to earth.
Next she, rather improbably I thought, knocked out Bethe Correia in what might have been an unfortunate victory for her as it apparently led to a severe overestimation of her boxing ability. At some point, she got sucked into the media vortex so completely it resulted in the absurd sight of her standing on a Melbourne stage calling Holly Holm (of all people) a fake nice person. Like her as a fighter or not, the one thing that's consistently been said of Holm throughout both her boxing and MMA career was that she was a genuinely nice person. Maybe it's because she prefers letting her management team do her outside-the-cage fighting for her.
Regardless, for longtime fans of Rousey, the ones who'd seen her every interview, watched those goofy vlogs she put up when first breaking onto the scene, saw her kill it guest-hosting TMZ and so on, it was a sign that the wheels might be starting to come off. Although it broke my heart as a fan, I couldn't say I was surprised when she got knocked out in the fight with Holm, She seemed a bit off balance at the weigh-ins, as if her grasp on reality might not be as tight as it should be. By choosing to box with a former world champ, it was hard not to wonder if she may have bought into her own hype a bit too much.
Quite naturally, there was a bit of a hype correction following Ronda's loss. There were a core group of haters who tried to say she was never any good but knowledgeable fans knew better. It had been said many times that the women's side of the sport was evolving rapidly and there was no shortage of speculation that time was beginning to arrive. Knowing Rousey was somewhat limited by injuries accrued over years of fighting at the top levels of judo, improving her wrestling wasn't an option nor did she appear to be a natural kicker. We all assumed the Holm fight was a wake-up call and she was going to start working hard on her boxing, seemingly the only viable weapon to add to her judo and grappling skills. When she surfaced after disappearing for a year only to get quickly dispatched by Amanda Nunes while showing no real improvement to her boxing were we really able to assess her true fighting abilities. For whatever reason, the boxing training didn't look as though it had paid off and now it makes sense to say the sport caught up to Ronda Rousey. What doesn't make sense is to say she was all hype or a media creation. Rousey looked up at a female MMA match on the television in the bar she worked at one day and said "I can beat these chicks" and she was right...until she wasn't.
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