Boxing Champ/coach Lucia Rijker: Ronda Rousey's Supercombat Could Possibly Be 'Cyborg'

Boxing Champ/coach Lucia Rijker: Ronda Rousey's Supercombat Could Possibly Be 'Cyborg'

Ronda Rousey just kept popping up in lucia rijker million dollar baby Rijker’s conversations.

Friends would begin with, "There’s this girl," and gush about Rousey’s preventing, her swagger and their similarity.

Then UFC President Dana White called Rousey "the Lucia Rijker of ladies’s MMA," and Rijker determined she had to meet the Strikeforce girls’s bantamweight champion for herself.

Rousey (5-zero MMA, three-zero SF) works with Rijker’s former manager, Darrin Harvey, who despatched Rijker the clip of White in hopes of pairing them together for Rousey’s battle against Sarah Kaufman (15-1 MMA, 6-1 SF), which takes place Saturday at Valley View On line casino Center in San Diego. ("Strikedrive: Rousey vs. Kaufman" airs on Showtime and Showtime Extreme.)

Harvey’s pitch to Rijker: "She’s just like you."

So began the relationship between the undefeated and now-retired boxer and kickboxer, and certainly one of MMA’s sizzlingtest commodities.

As some of the dominant fighters in the history of women’s fight sports, Rijker’s expectations of Rousey have been most likely modest once they first met in the gym. They definitely modified, however, after just a few classes with the fighter.

Rijker, who’s perhaps greatest known for her function as the soiled boxer in "Million Greenback Baby," worked alongsideside Rousey’s hanging coach, Edmond Tarverdyan. She offered Diana Prazak, a featherweight world champion boxer, to spar with Rousey and was impressed with what she saw.


Rijker was light on the specifics of what she worked on with Rousey, but stated Prazak was a stylistic match for Kaufman, whose aggressive placing led her to the bantamweight title earlier than a submission loss to Marloes Coenen in 2010.

"She’s very dominant, and he or she leads with her head, and she or he has some good right hands and a few strikes," Rijker stated of Kaufman. "However to be able to hit somebody, you’ve obtained to be proper in front of them. So there’s a number of ways to keep away from that or remove that, and that’s what we’re working on."

Rousey shouldn't be Rijker’s first exposure to MMA. In the early 90s, she hung out in Japan and watched as promoters usually combined professional wrestling with real fighting.

Rijker obtained her begin in combat sports activities at age 6 when she took up judo, and he or she later trained in jiu-jitsu.

"Not every grappler or wrestler is capable of being a superb striker," she said. "Nevertheless, Ronda is such an all-around athlete that I’m impressed with the explosion in her punches and the way she picks it up because it’s a very totally different type of explosive power that you simply’re working on compared to judo."

Along with these physical presents, Rijker feels Rousey might be a good bigger success because of the crew behind her. As a trailblazer in women’s fight sports, Rijker had few of the sponsorship alternatives available to athletes at the moment and "lived like a monk" on the peak of her career. Rousey, she mentioned, is able to focus exclusively on her craft with out having to worry about keeping a roof over her head.

"I trained or three times a day, however I lived off nothing," Rijker said. "When you will have an overall athlete like Ronda and fantastic workforce of folks that support her to be a full-time athlete, she may be anything."

Certainly, they met because Rousey is already something. After successful a bronze medal in judo on the 2008 Olympics, she transitioned to MMA and fought her first amateur bout two years ago. Since then, she’s finished all of her opponents via armbar within the first round, together with Miesha Tate, from whom she took the title in March.