Kayla Harrison was two weeks out from defending her UFC women's bantamweight title when the UFC flew her to New York and doctors gave her two options: have neck surgery immediately, or risk paralysis. That was late January.
About two weeks before the Netflix main event that would shake up combat sports, Ronda Rousey did what she'd been doing non-stop for the previous three weeks: she tried to hold two mutually exclusive emotional positions in a single sentence and called it grace. When TMZ caught her on camera on April
Kayla Harrison has two Olympic gold medals in judo, a UFC bantamweight title around her waist, and a public diagnosis of her old sport that the International Judo Federation cannot really argue with: modern judo is, in her words, "kind of boring." The leg-grab ban they've defended for sixteen years?
The streaming platform that changed how the world watches television is about to introduce 325 million subscribers to combat sports. And the first thing they'll see is a woman who last won a fight when "Hotline Bling" was still on the charts.
Ronda Rousey showed up to a Netflix press conference in New York on April 15 and spent the afternoon explaining that Kayla Harrison, the reigning UFC bantamweight champion who has defended the belt Rousey used to own, has "the charisma of a wet towel" and "will always be in me and Gina's shadow."
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