Ronda Rousey and Floyd Mayweather are back in the headlines together. Last month, Ronda landed an epic diss on Floyd after beating him out for Best Fighter at the ESPYs, asking, “I wonder how Floyd feels being beat by a woman for once.” I’m sure Mayweather spent the evening wiping the tears out of his eyes with giant stacks of money.
Yahoo News brought up the issue of how little Ronda makes in comparison to Floyd during an interview. Here’s how that went…
Bianna Golodryga: We talk about seperate but equal. But having even mentioning the Floyd Mayweather fight, they walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars at stake. You being at the height of your sport make maybe a million dollars at most per fight? Does that anger you and what can we do to change that?
Ronda Rousey: I don’t like to talk about exactly how much I make but I’m extremely comfortable and happy. If I got to a point where I had almost 50 fights, I would probably be making close to the same amount that Floyd does. But at this time, I have 11. So I can’t expect it to be exactly equal yet, I gotta put more time in.
The two athletes also live in very different sports ecosystems. The boxing model sees the majority of the money going into the pockets of the few megastars who can drive PPV buys. With UFC, money goes back to the organization so they can afford to fund stuff like UFC Fan Expos and develop new divisions like featherweight and women’s bantamweight.
Now, with Conor McGregor at featherweight and Ronda Rousey at women’s bantamweight, it looks like those were good investments… better for the sport than just giving one douchebag $180 million. Could UFC fighters be paid more? Absolutely. But between the two systems, there’s no doubt that the UFC model helps the overall sport more than the boxing model.
And if Ronda Rousey wants to take a shortcut to making Floyd Mayweather money, maybe she should take the advice of Fox Sports…
(via Yahoo! News)
