Everyone Failed Ronda Rousey

Women’s mixed martial arts pioneer Ronda Rousey’s new book, Our Fight, is a remarkable document. If her first book, 2015’s best-selling My Fight / Your Fight, was intended to establish the Bronze Medal-winning judoka and then-UFC women’s bantamweight champion as the greatest combat athlete of all time, this book — also co-written with Maria Burns Ortiz — explains how it all went south so quickly. Indeed, in the annals of athlete autobiographies, this book stands apart. A closer comparison, in tone if not in content or literary significance, might be scholastic philosopher Peter Abelard’s 1132 epistolary autobiography, The History of My Calamities, in which the great schoolman describes how his life’s work has led to persecution not dissimilar to that faced by Jesus Christ.