Kayla Harrison went on Deep Waters and did something most champions are too polished to try. She took the one name she gets compared to every single week, her old Olympic training roommate Ronda Rousey, and graded her out loud with a red pen.
My take is simple. Harrison is dead right about judo, half right about MMA, and completely right to say any of it, because a champion with a mean streak beats a champion who thanks her sponsors and goes home.
The judo argument is over
Quick history, courtesy of MMA Weekly’s write-up. Rousey and Harrison roomed together as teenagers chasing the Olympics. Rousey, three years older, took bronze at the 2008 Beijing Games and became the first American woman to medal in Olympic judo. Harrison won gold four years later in 2012, then won gold again in 2016.
Harrison opened her case by insisting she didn’t want to sound cocky and wasn’t. Nothing in human history has ever followed a disclaimer like that except something cocky, and she delivered. She walked through the judo ladder (World Cups, Grand Prix, Grand Slams, the World Masters, Worlds, the Olympics) and then lined the two of them up rung by rung.
“Ronda has an Olympic bronze medal, a world silver medal, and she won a World Cup and medaled at some Grand Prix,” Harrison said.
Then came her side of the ledger. “I have won every single World Cup, every single Grand Prix, every single Grand Slam. I won the World Masters twice.” She added that she won a world title, picked up three bronze medals at Worlds, and won the Olympics twice.
That’s no contest. Rousey is the most famous American woman ever to wear a judogi, and Harrison is the most decorated, and those are two different trophies. Fame came from the Octagon. The medals came from the mat, and on the mat Harrison has the bigger shelf by a mile.
One footnote, though, because MMA Weekly flagged it and it’s too good to skip. Rousey beat Harrison twice back when Harrison was 14 or 15 and Rousey was 17 or 18. So the head-to-head belongs to Ronda, recorded at an age when Kayla was barely old enough to see a PG-13 movie alone.
The MMA shot lands, mostly
This is where the compliments ran out. Harrison gave Rousey her flowers first. She said Rousey paved the way, that she’s standing on Rousey’s shoulders, and that she’s grateful for it.
Then she picked the flowers back up. Asked about Rousey’s rise and title reign, Harrison described it as “Dominating women who picked up gloves three years ago at a cardio-kickboxing class” and decided to give fighting a shot.
Is that a fair description of every woman Rousey fought? It’s a caricature, and Harrison knows it. But strip off the exaggeration and there’s a real point underneath. First-generation champions in a brand-new division usually get the thinner years, because the deep talent pool doesn’t exist yet. That’s true of pioneers in basically every sport, and saying it out loud is fair game.
Where Harrison trips over her own argument is the shoulders line. You can’t thank somebody for building the staircase and then sneer at the steps. In my view, the division Harrison now rules got deep because Rousey beating those early fighters made women’s MMA worth taking seriously. The soft-schedule era and the pioneer era are the same era. Harrison wants credit for the house and a discount on the foundation.
Still, I’d rather hear this than another round of mutual respect that ends with both sides agreeing everybody’s great. Harrison has a belt and an opinion, and she put the second one on the table without a lawyer reading it first.
The armbar line is the best part
Asked whether Rousey’s signature armbar would be a threat, Harrison delivered the line of the week. She pointed out that the two of them learned the armbar at the same gym, asked whether anybody really thinks Rousey is going to armbar her, and told people not to be disrespectful.
That’s a champion calling her shot, and I love a champion who calls her shot. It’s also the cleanest version of her whole argument. The thing that made Rousey a pay-per-view monster was the same technique a teenage Harrison drilled across the room from her. To the public, the armbar was a magic trick. To Harrison, it’s Tuesday practice.
The only problem with the don’t-be-disrespectful routine is that the last two times these two actually competed, Rousey won both. Harrison was a kid, and kids lose to older kids. But if you’re going to tell the world your old roommate can’t hurt you, the scoreboard from that gym is the one stat Ronda gets to throw back. Harrison handed her the receipt herself.
