In his opinion, women competing in MMA seemed too violent and most fans wouldn’t enjoy watching it; but fortunately for female athletes that wasn’t the case. Rousey at the time was competing in a rival MMA promotion who was at one point UFC’s biggest competitor, Strikeforce, as a top female fighter in the hunt for a title shot. In Strikeforce, she was destroying the competition with finishes less than one minute. As a result, she then started to attract the attention of Dana White and UFC fans alike forcing him to eat his own words that “women will never fight in the UFC” by creating a women’s bantamweight bracket and debuting the first female bout on February 23, 2013 headlining Ronda as the main event on the fight card (“The Unbreakable Ronda Rousey”). This event really put female fighters on the map in the fighting world, MMA or not. In addition, along with Ronda getting her storybook ending of being the first female Bantamweight Champion she won her fight against a very tough competitor, Liz Carmouche, by way of via armbar, which is her go to submission, under a minute. Ronda displaying such dominance and finesse when she fights truly grasps the attention of any viewer witnessing her fights. She acts as a pioneer of female athletes …show more content…
She has appeared in numerous amounts of movies and television shows as well as radio talk shows. Before the UFC created a female division no woman really considered to even try a simple boxing class let alone a MMA fight. Ronda has such a powerful influence in the female community that she even has little teenage girls saying, “I want fight like Ronda Rousey!” Having taken the time to visit a local Riverside MMA gym, an owner was expressing that “[he] has more women than ever walking through the gym asking if they can try a class”, he than turns around to ask, “what makes you want to try the class today?” Most women would respond, “I saw a Ronda Rousey fight and seeing her doing what she does inspired me to come give it (MMA) a try.” Ever since Ronda joined the UFC, for the past two years she has drawn crowds up to 50,000 to come see her compete (ufc.com). As a result “if she meant to or not, she created a movement of female fighters” (“Women in Combat”). Smaller fighter organizations were created, such as One FC and Invicta, to only host female fighters in all sorts of weight classes being that not all female fighters compete in bantamweight and are not up to the competition level of the UFC. Just recently on March 14, 2015 UFC debuted their Strawweight division (115 lbs) being that is the second most densely populated division for female fighters in the MMA world. Ronda paved the road for these female athletes to go