When I initially posed this question to myself, I gave myself a slow shake of the head and a slight snort of derision. It’s pretty obvious I told myself. Having gone from the best female fighter in the world a few short years ago, Chris ‘Cyborg’ Justino finds herself a relative outcast, the unloved orphan child with her face pushed up against the window of Casa UFC, while Uncle Dana and Ronda Rousey laugh and giggle sitting comfortably around a roaring fire – well maybe that’s just in my head, and when I posed this question to a colleague of mine, he did the same shake of the head, but went down a completely different path. “Who is Luke Skywalker without Darth Vader or Batman without the Joker?” I got what he was saying; can you really call yourself top dog when there is a snarling wolf slowly pacing back and forth waiting patiently in the shadows?
OK so enough of the metaphors, this is a serious point. Since her TKO victory over WMMA’s first heroine Gina Carano, Cyborg was considered the best female fighter on the planet. That was until the meteoric rise of Miss Ronda Rousey. Since then she has fallen on tough times. While ‘Rowdy’ continued her rise, firstly moving down to 135lb and capturing the Strikeforce title, before highhandedly pushing women’s MMA kicking and screaming into the UFC and the public’s consciousness, Cyborg was going through a divorce, having her Strikeforce 145lb division dissolved, and failing a drugs test (who would have thought it!)
On the evidence above, it’s easy to say Cyborg needs this fight to happen more than Rousey, and when you look at their current trajectories it’s hard not to agree, but we need to look at the Skywalker/Vader conundrum. Rousey has done everything possible in women’s MMA. She has brought it to the biggest MMA promotion on earth, despite Dana White telling us it would never happen. She has defended her UFC Championship six times, having only gone out of the first round once in her career, and it has been recently reported that due to the number of title defenses, combined with her total ring time, she is officially the most dominant athlete in history! However, there is one thing missing from a short but glittering career. It’s the Wolf slowly prowling in the shadows just out of the limelight Rousey has created. And no matter how much she tries to pretend it’s not there….Cyborg is going nowhere!
I’m my opinion; Rousey is the best female athlete competing in combat sports today; she has done it all and then some, but where is her nemesis? Having made a career out of being the heel, like one of the Diaz brothers, she had transcended simply being hated to fans loving to hate her. This was never more evident than her feud with former Strikeforce Champion Meisha Tate. Here she really embraced the role of the bag guy with real hatred. There was not even a professional curtsy shown to Tate, who being one of WMMA’s sweethearts, meant it took its toll on Rousey’s fan base. Since then she seems to be turning the tide, the respect she showed to Cat Zingano post fight was moving and her many talk show appearances and Hollywood roles have softened public opinion, but what she now needs more than ever is a bad guy. Outside of Ronda, Cyborg is the best by far! Unbeaten since her debut and crushing all in her path, it’s the super fight the MMA world is waiting for, and the one true test waiting for Rousey.
The one thing that is keeping the proverbial wolf from the door: Dana White has said that if Cyborg can make the 135lb weight limit for Invicta FC, then the UFC title fight is all but hers, it’s making that weight limit which is the stumbling block. Cyborg has called for Rousey to move up in weight, after all Ronda originally competed at 145lbs. Cyborg has also asked for a catch weight fight at 140lb, which obviously the champ is not going to entertain. Rousey maintains that she is the champ and challengers must some come to her rather than the other way round and that’s a valid point, but it’s Cyborg trying to make this fight happen while Rousey sits back and waits.
Cyborg maybe the one pushing this fight, but on evidence its Rousey that needs this fight more than Justino. This is the one fight that gives Rousey a shining white horse to ride out on, the one fight that turns her from Clubber Lang to Rocky Balboa, this is also the one fight that opens the gate to the prowling wolf, and it’s only by slaying the wolf that Rousey can put an exclamation point on a near perfect career. It’s not just how you beat them, or how quickly, to be considered the greatest, it’s who you beat that matters. With a career so close to being perfect, for Rousey there is only one more opponent that counts!
