Can Ronda reignite the Rousey effect?

By the time I first shared a space with Ronda Rousey, I had been covering Conor McGregor’s astronomical rise for more than half a decade. Up until that moment, I hadn’t met someone with the same presence — kids would probably call it “aura” nowadays — as the Irishman. Yet, while I sat at the UFC 187 post-fight press conference at the MGM Grand Garden Arena, awaiting the post-fight insights of newly crowned light heavyweight champion Daniel Cormier, Rousey entered the room.

Every pair of eyeballs followed “Rowdy” as she strutted through. At the time she was the reigning UFC women’s bantamweight champion, an untouchable force, a cultural icon and arguably the only person who could rival the star power of McGregor, and she had the game in a chokehold as deadly as her signature armbar. Fresh off her fifth win for the promotion, Dana White was proclaiming her the female equivalent to prime “Iron” Mike Tyson.

Just two years into her UFC tenure, she had transcended the sport, landing roles in gargantuan Hollywood franchises “The Expendables”, “Fast & Furious” and “Entourage. ” Four months after UFC 187, Beyoncé would feature Rousey’s “Do Nothing B****” speech during her main event performance at the Made In America festival. That same year, her autobiography, “My Fight/Your Fight,” was featured on the New York Times Best Seller List.

That balmy night in Sin City, you couldn’t have convinced me that we would only see Rousey win one more time in the Octagon — another blistering finish, this time of Bethe Correia — but assumption makes fools of us all. It felt like Holly Holm head-kicked all that aura into oblivion in Melbourne, Australia, six months after I was spellbound by the starlet. The public wanted its pound of flesh and Rousey delivered the opposite, shielding her face with a pillow as she made her way through LAX on her arrival home.