Leila Ali definitely stirred the pot when she recently said “No woman in the world can beat me.” As part of that declaration, she (at the prompting of the interviewer) called out the women’s UFC bantamweight champion, Ronda Rousey, saying “ She’s too much smaller than me anyways. She’s like the size of my daughter. My 3-year-old.” Not long after the video of her comments started making rounds on the internet, Ali took to Twitter to clarify that she’s not making a comeback.
That didn’t stop Rousey from giving her response to The Daily Beast, however:
“If she wants to take me up on that, I’m around,” Rousey says of Ali. “She’s retired and has several kids. I understand why she’d think that because she has a size advantage, but if you saw my last fight it had nothing to do with size or strength at all. That’s not how I beat people. So you can’t count having a size and strength advantage as having a real advantage against me.”
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Rousey also repeated her stance on a woman vs. man fight in the UFC, that she’s dead set against it:
“I don’t think it’s a great idea to have a man hitting a woman on television,” says Rousey. “I’ll never say that I’ll lose, but you could have a girl getting totally beat up on TV by a guy—which is a bad image to put across. With all the football [domestic violence] stuff that’s been happening, not a good idea. It’s fun to theorize about and talk about, but it’s something that’s much better in theory than fact.”
It’s an undoubted sign of Rousey’s growing celebrity status that she’s becoming the center point of increasingly theoretical “superfight” opportunities. She may not have any immediate bouts lined up in the UFC, but she’s at no shortage for callouts and hypothetical challengers.
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