We’ll see what Ronda Rousey’s made of when she fights without the knuckledusters, writes Steve Bunce

Her next opponent, Holly Holm, was The Ring's Female Boxer of the Year in 2005 and 2006

UFC fighter Ronda Rousey (Jeff Bottari/ Zuffa LLC)

Ronda Rousey has never had an amateur or a professional boxing contest, she has fought just 15 times in total in five years on the mixed martial arts circuit and right now she is on the cover of boxing’s so-called bible, The Ring.

Welcome to the weird, slightly warped and brutal life and times of the world’s greatest female fighter – in any code – and a genuine star inside the UFC organisation. Her last five fights, all inside the UFC, which is a promotional company and not a sport, lasted a total of just 188 seconds. It includes a 14 and a 16-second stoppage and she fights only twice each year.

Rousey has stopped or knocked out all 15 of her opponents, and 14 have been bludgeoned, left pleading and distressed on the canvas inside the first round. However, the first round lasts five minutes in the world of mixed martial arts, which is three minutes longer than women fight in the boxing business, and only three of the wins have come directly from her fists.

These, it needs to be added, are concealed inside lightly padded knuckleduster gloves, which provide her and all MMA fighters with a nasty tool; it is an advantage Rousey will lose once her fists are inside a regulation set of 10-ounce boxing gloves and she does something other than be “blonde and bad ass” to earn her picture on the cover of the ancient magazine.


 Ronda Rousey (right) on her way to beating Bethe Correia in their title fight in August
 (Reuters)

She has been placed on the cover of the January edition of The Ring, which is owned by Oscar De La Hoya’s company, because of the dream that one day she will be a boxer. De La Hoya, now a leading promoter, is waiting for Rousey’s conversion: “Golden Boy Promotions will be right there with her.” Rousey is 28, Hollywood adores her, but she wants to be a boxer and that is why De La Hoya has obliged; she is the UFC’s main attraction right now, but in 2008, at the Beijing Olympics, she won a bronze medal in judo. She is not manufactured, not just a semi-naked blonde wearing six-inch heels every time she gets on the scales, and sadly too many of the top female boxers from the Nineties, when the sport had some profile, were rubbish.

Rousey fights next in Melbourne, at the Etihad Stadium, which could have a capacity of 70,000 on the night, against a former boxer called Holly Holm a week tomorrow. The roof, by the way, will be closed and the tickets range from A$100 (£47) to A$468, including postage. Yes, she is the best female athlete that you have never heard about.

Holm was a proper boxer, a veteran of 38 fights and 285 rounds in the boxing ring. In 2005 and 2006 she was The Ring’s Female Boxer of the Year at a time when Rousey was winning and losing in major international judo events – she won medals at World Championships. Holm lost just twice, once on a cut, and once in arguably the best women’s boxing contest ever when she was stopped in seven rounds by Anne Sophie Mathis of France in 2011. The following year Holm boxed sensibly, moved and won the instant rematch with ease. She retired from boxing in 2013, switched to MMA full-time and was quickly acquired by the UFC in 2014. She is unbeaten in nine, aged 34 now and considered the underdog in Melbourne.

If Rousey gets close to Holm, which is likely, then the fight will be over before either of them can display any boxing ability, which the MMA brigade refer to as “striking skills”. However, the boxing purist in me wants Holm to move her feet, flick out her southpaw jab and catch Rousey, who leaves her jaw in the air as she rushes forward. An educated jab defeats brawn, but I doubt it will happen that way.

Rousey is a butcher, dislocating elbows during her “arm bar” manoeuvre, which is how 12 of her 15 fights have ended. There are some who might say that a fight lasting 16 seconds, with one of the fighters calling it off a second before her elbow is dislocated and without a punch landing, is not much of a fight. However, the only people in sport with thinner skins than boxers are the devoted followers of the UFC brand and, by golly, they are a witless band in defence of their idols.

Rousey, by the way, has so far picked up just over a million dollars from six first-round wins at sellouts in the UFC; a few months ago, James DeGale of Harlesden, another Beijing medal winner, was paid $1.7m (£1.1m) for winning a world title one afternoon in Boston in front of a few hundred people. Rousey knows that she could make some serious cash in the boxing business and a fight with Katie Taylor, who will try to win her second Olympic gold next summer in Rio, would generate millions of dollars in 2017. That is a fight to look forward to and worth a front-page picture.