The loudest voice in the history of women's combat sports belonged to a child who could not form an intelligible sentence until she was six. Ronda Rousey was born in Riverside in 1987 with the umbilical cord around her neck, and the resulting oxygen deprivation caused apraxia, a motor speech disorder in which the brain knows exactly what it wants to say but cannot direct the mouth to produce it. Her parents moved the family to Jamestown, North Dakota, for intensive therapy at Minot State. When she was eight, her father died by suicide after a debilitating sledding injury. Her mother, AnnMaria De Mars, was the first American to win a world judo championship, and she woke her daughters up with arm bars, which sounds like something else entirely until you understand she was hardwiring a survival reflex into a child's nervous system.

Rousey qua ...