Rousey makes cover of SI, can’t get on Tinder to find someone to kiss
Ronda Rousey tried to use an alter ego – Brynn Campbell – on the dating app Tinder, to no avail. Instead, she says she mostly hangs out with her dog Mochi.
UFC women’s bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey has had a remarkable year.
The 28-year-old stands atop SI.com’s latest pound for pound rankings, an honor that can point to the fact that she has won her last two fights by a combined 30 seconds.
In February, Rousey became the first MMA fighter to appear in the SI Swimsuit Issue. Later that month, she continued her reign with a 14-second armbar takedown of Cat Zingano, the fastest finish of any kind in a UFC championship fight.
She stopped by The Tonight Show and demonstrated her famous armbar move on an unlucky yet thoroughly impressed Jimmy Fallon.
She was even challenged by a Houston Texans cheerleader who was a state champion boxer and thinks she has a plan that could stymie Rousey.
And of course there was Rousey’s memorable appearance at WresleMania 31, when she teamed up with The Rock.
But Rousey knows that with fame, there comes a price.
She tried to use an alter ego – Brynn Campbell – on the dating app Tinder, to no avail. Instead, she says she mostly hangs out with her dog Mochi.
S—, she says, the only person I’m making out with is my dog.
Rousey says she has the support of her family and friends to help navigate her through the rough waters of being a celebrity.
“What I realized is once you become socially unhealthy, it’s impossible to stay psychologically healthy, she says. [Celebrities] get surrounded by people that benefit off of them in some way. Every single person that they see in the day either gains financial stability, status, something from that person. And so the people around you reflect reality back to you.”
When she’s not appearing in Fast and Furious 7 or the upcoming Entourage, Rousey even found time to write a book.
The book, entitled My Fight/Your Fight, hits shelves Tuesday and recounts career moments such as her one-armed judo victory at the 2007 World Championships.
Could Rousey be on the way to retiring from the MMA? Only time will tell. The shorter my fights are, the longer I can fight. Rousey says….”I want to stop before it really erodes me.
For more on Rousey, check out L. Jon Wertheim’s story in this week’s Sports Illustrated (subscribe here).
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Dave Meltzer explains the significance of the cover.
This makes her the second UFC fighter to get a cover, which at one point was considered a standard in the sports world for making it as a true mainstream superstar. MMA, which is rarely covered in the pages of the country’s highest profile sports magazine, has had one prior cover.
Roger Huerta, a then-UFC lightweight fighter who for the past few years has been best known as the answer to a trivia question that is no longer valid about being the only UFC fighter on the SI cover.
With the exception of iconic boxing figures, a Sports Illustrated cover is a rarity for combat sports athletes. Rousey would be the first judoka ever to make the cover. Nobody from the jiu-jitsu world has ever made a cover, and the lone amateur wrestler, Danny Hodge, did so back in 1957.
Still, the other part of the cover is the jinx. The lone female combat sport athlete to make the cover was boxer Christy Martin in 1996. While Martin didn’t lose a fight until 1998, her career never really advanced past that point. Martin is best known as a nostalgia figure from the 90s when for a brief period of time, people talked about women boxing. Like Huerta, she is probably best known as the answer to a trivia question about the cover. As a sports figure, Rousey is almost assuredly going to be remembered as something far more significant.