Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano fought for 17 seconds longer than they should have over the weekend.
Their brief Saturday encounter in a Southern California hexagon, a comeback for both after ridiculously long layoffs yet still promoted by Jake Paul’s MVP outfit as the biggest women’s MMA fight in history, ended as soon as Rousey set Carano up for an arm bar, the ex-judoka’s trademark finishing move from back when she was relevant. Carano, who gave up the cage for acting and right-wing mouthpiecing, tapped quicker than Fred Astaire.
Their post-match embrace lasted much longer and exuded more vigor than the actual match. And combat sports’ sad, unsafe, and disgraceful spiral into an oldies-friendly pastime continues.
Both fighters surely had their heyday, though long passed. This was fiasco-by-numbers stuff, with Rousey and Carano having gone a combined 27 years without a fight and 29 years without a win leading up to this weekend’s nonsense.
Rousey was the first USA woman to win a non-exhibition Olympic medal in judo after taking a bronze in the 2008 Beijing games. She was also the first female UFC star; she came into Dana White’s promotion in 2013 with a big reputation, and for a time exceeded it. She won her first six fights by knockout, including five stoppages in 66 seconds or less. She was thrilling. Rousey became the first MMA fighter of any gender to get on the cover of Ring magazine, the boxing bible, with its January 2016 issue. By the publishing date, the grapple-centric submissions specialist had already been exposed as somebody who couldn’t block or take a punch while losing her title to Holly Holm via a spectacular knockout in November 2015. Rousey got KO’d again in the first round a year later by Amanda Nunes before stepping away from the sport.
Carano, now 44 years old, paved the way for Rousey’s UFC embrace through wins with lesser MMA outfits, EliteXC and Strikeforce, though her fighting never quite lived up to her marketing. Carano got knocked out in the first round of her bout against Cris Cyborg and immediately gave up the fight game for a shot at Hollywood stardom. Her screen career peaked with a recurring role on The Mandalorian. But she threw it away to continue posting right-wing memes on social media. Carano lost the Star Wars gig in 2021 after she went on Instagram to whine about criticism of her politics and compare herself to victims of the Holocaust, and casting directors stopped calling.
Rousey and Carano, for all their time away, remain the biggest names in female MMA history. Paul, exploiting the simple reality that renown trumps ability in marketing combat sports, offered them a night together in a cage and both accepted. One sign of Carano’s washedness: She claimed she lost 100 pounds training for the fight. Rousey was paid a reported $2.2 million from Paul’s MVP; Carano got $1.05 million. For 17 seconds of pain and a couple days of social media humiliation, a pretty good haul for both.
Nostalgia ruled the night. UFC heavyweight champ and MMA all-timer Jon Jones worked the fights for Netflix in the commentator’s booth. A good portion of the broadcast was spent pushing for Jones to get back in the ring against Francis Ngannou, a washed-up 39-year-old former UFC heavyweight who knocked out an almost anonymous pudgy guy named Philipe Lins on the undercard.
Jones has fought just twice in six years. In his last bout, in 2024, Jones took three rounds to KO a 42-year-old former MMA star turned fireman (like, a real, full-time working firefighter). For all his inactivity, Jones is still under contract to UFC and remains the promotion’s biggest American draw by far. Since leaving UFC, Ngannou has been dabbling in boxing; where past-their-prime dudes like Anthony Joshua and Tyson Fury have used him to get a bigger payday than a younger, better fighter would bring. Now Joshua and Fury are scheduled to fight each other in August. The Joshua vs. Fury bout, which would have been worth looking forward to if only we were stuck in the year 2015, is being called “the biggest fight in British boxing history.”
For all the hubbub surrounding Rousey and Carano’s geezer-on-geezer non-violence, the biggest combat sports story of the weekend came when Irish douche Conor McGregor announced on Saturday night that he’s returning to the cage in two months against Max Holloway. McGregor has had no fights since 2021 and just one win since 2016.
I’ll watch, but won’t blink.
