Hype or Hope? Meisha Tate vs. Ronda Rousey
|
Strikeforce.com |
The upcoming Strikeforce
battle between incumbent 135lb WMMA-champ Meisha Tate and relative newcomer
Ronda Rousey takes place March 3rd in Columbus,
Ohio. The Rousey and Tate
fight is an exhausted subject for many who claim the hype surrounding these two
women has reached its saturation. The fight has indeed been promoted and
hyped with daily interviews, projections, twitter updates and general
shit-talking from both women. Many WMMA supporters are exhausted by the
excessive publicity, claiming that there are other female fighters out there
who deserve attention, which is absolutely true. There are plenty of
women fighting in smaller venues and training diligently to reach the critical
mass currently occupied by Tate and Rousey. But while I agree that Rousey's
continual self-promotion and Tate's numerous attempts to exempt herself from
the drama have become tenuous and somewhat annoying, the buildup of this fight
is an integral part of bringing women out of the margins and into the forefront
of the sport of MMA.
The problem is not the
hype surrounding this fight; it is the constant insistence from multiple media
outlets that Rousey or Tate must be ‘the face’ of WMMA. Yet the search for a singular representative
of the sport has been in place since Debi Purcell first came on the scene
nearly a decade ago. Although the
popularity of the UFC and other MMA venues does not ride on the shoulders of
one man, the sport of WMMA must, for some reason, apparently be embodied by one
woman. Gina Carano, now a B-movie star,
failed to uphold this monumental position after her loss to Cris “Cyborg” Santos. And Santos
was never considered ‘the face’ of WMMA, primarily because her face does not
conform to the standards of beauty necessary to become promoted by American
sports media outlets. The hype
surrounding the Tate/Rousey fight reveals how female fighters will be promoted
in the media as pageant contestants whose talents are punching and kicking
rather than singing or dancing.
No comments:
Post a Comment