With apologies to the politically correct crowd (but not really), men are bigger, stronger and faster than women.
This is a huge understatement for people with common sense or anyone who ever played on the playground at school. For the rest, it’s the start of an argument.
The reason I mention this is because of the repeated claims by mixed martial arts fighter Ronda Rousey and her camp that she could beat male professional fighters.
Yes, it’s partly a publicity stunt, but there is enough emotion behind it to think these people really believe what they’re saying.
Apparently, they’ve been watching too many movies and TV shows. You know what I’m talking about — the shows in which women beat up men, sometimes in stilettos and a pencil skirt. They don’t even have to redo their mascara. They look like models, probably tipping the scales at 110-120 pounds, and they’re going Mike Tyson on men twice their size.
Whenever there’s a dominant female athlete, the talk starts again: Can she beat a man? It’s almost as absurd as the talk years ago about Michael Jordan playing on the PGA Tour.
Golf is one of the few sports where it would seem women could compete against men because it’s based more on skill than brawn.
Suzy Whaley played in a PGA Tour (men’s) event once, and she didn’t make the cut. She qualified for the tournament by playing from the women’s tees. Michelle Wie played in eight PGA Tour events between 2004-08 and didn’t make a single cut. Annika Sorenstam — probably the greatest female golfer ever — played in a PGA Tour event but missed the second-day cut.
Tennis stars Serena and Venus Williams were still teenagers when they claimed they could beat any man ranked 200th or worse. Karsten Braasch, a pack-a-day cigarette smoker ranked 203rd on the men’s tour, beat them both, 6-1, then 6-2.
Braasch smoked a cigarette during the change of sides.
“I didn’t think it would be so hard,” said Serena. “I hit shots which would have been winners on the (women’s) tour, but he caught them easily.”
Who saw that coming?
Now along comes Rousey, a 5-foot-7, 135-pound dynamo who is unbeaten in 11 fights. She dispatched her last opponent — previously unbeaten Cat Zingano — in 14 seconds. Her fights have made her the talk of the sports world. They have also spawned a lot of brash talk.
Joe Rogan, a color commentator for the Ultimate Fighting Championship, says Rousey could beat half the men in the top 20 of her weight class (bantamweight). Rousey has done anything but discourage such talk, even though she believes society would never sanction an event in which a man hits a woman.
During an ESPN interview, she responded to Rogan’s comments about beating 50 percent of the ranked fighters by saying, “I never say that I’m incapable of beating anybody because I don’t believe in putting limits on myself. So … I would have to say if you’re just talking about what’s in the realm of possibility of who I could beat, well, I could beat 100 percent of them.”
Last year Rousey said she could compete with Floyd Mayweather — pound for pound perhaps the best boxer in the world — in the mixed martial arts format: “I wouldn’t even stand up, I wouldn’t be near him,” she said. “I would bear crawl over there, too low for him to hit me, and tackle him down.”
Dana White, president of UFC, took it one step further: “You take a street fight, Ronda wins and hurts (Mayweather) badly. You do an MMA fight, same result.”
These people are ignoring simple biology. Men have an advantage: It’s called testosterone. It’s what makes them bigger, stronger and faster. It’s not even fair, but there it is. No one can do anything about it — not the courts, not Title IX, not Congress.
The one person close to the Rousey camp who gets it is Rousey’s mother, AnnMaria De Mars, a former world judo champion.
“That’s a stupid idea,” she told reporters. “Seriously, that’s a stupid idea. I’m as much a feminist as anyone, but the fact is that biologically, there’s a difference between men and women. Hello, duh. A woman who is 135 pounds and a man who is 135 pounds are not physically equal.”
Look at the sports that offer objective measures of the difference between men and women. In track and field, for instance, there’s no comparison. High school boys routinely surpass women’s world records.
Well, maybe all this talk about Rousey fighting a man is harmless, if idiotic, speculation, but what does it say about women’s sports if it’s not enough that a woman can dominate her own sex; she must be compared to men for validation?
Rousey is a great female fighter. The Williams sisters are great female tennis players. Wie is a great female golfer. That is all the validation they need.
Doug Robinson's columns run on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Email: drob@deseretnews.com