In her rise to becoming one of the biggest female sports stars on the planet, Ronda Rousey helped to drastically shift the landscape of the UFC.

Prior to the former Olympic medalist's arrival in 2013, there wasn't a place for women to compete on the biggest stage in mixed martial arts. Yet, after UFC President Dana White witnessed the domination Rousey was displaying inside the Strikeforce cage and feeling the buzz the 135-pound wrecking machine was creating outside of it, the organization's frontman decided the California native would be the perfect athlete to usher in a new chapter for his promotion.

While that ride would eventually end in harsh fashion following back-to-back knockouts of the brutal variety, the three years Rousey reigned as queen saw the fighter who once lived in her car reach mega-watt star status on a global scale. And with Rousey's retirement from MMA seeming all but certain according to White, the UFC president doesn't see anything attached to Rousey's career as a negative. Quite the opposite, in fact.

During a recent interview with ESPN's Brett Okamoto, the face of the UFC addressed the topic of Rousey's rise, fall, and exit from the sport she helped to bolster, and shared his thoughts on why the former women's bantamweight champion's tale is one of good fortune above all else.



"What's sad about the Ronda Rousey story?" White said in the interview. "A woman in sports, let alone fighting, came in and made way more money than all the men. [She] blew the thing up and created an actual division for women. Joanna Jedrzejczyk makes a ton of money. Amanda (Nunes) makes a ton of money. Now we are literally -- five blocks down the street -- doing the 125-pound division for 'The Ultimate Fighter' for women. Ronda Rousey is anything but a sad story.

"She made a ton of money. Here's a woman who at one point told everyone, 'I basically made no money in the Olympics and at one point was living in my car.' Now she made enough money where she doesn't have to work a day again in her life. That's anything but a sad."