Memoirs of an Outstanding* Teen

Chapter 45: Becoming Ronda Rousey

I only knew her after I saw her on Ellen, so I won't blame you if you don't know her either. What I know about her isn't much, but I already feel like I can relate to her on a spiritual level. Ronda Rousey is a female boxer who was formerly undefeated. As soon as she stepped into the ring, everybody knew that she was going to win the match, no matter who her contender was. That was until 2015. In 2015, somebody finally managed to knock her down.

In her interview, Ronda says she was crushed by the defeat, that she felt her entire life was now worthless, and that she even thought of the s-word (suicide). All her life, she had defined herself as the undefeated boxer, and now suddenly there she was, beaten. She felt she didn't know who she was anymore. The very foundation of her life was shaken.

For over a year, she couldn't even bring herself to fight again. But in December 2016, she decided she was going to come back and reclaim her title. She was going to fight again and take back that belt as champion. Millions of dollars were spent on the campaign, "Ronda Rousey, Fear the Return."

On the day of the fight, everybody and their mothers tuned in to watch the heroic comeback of a champion. Ronda Rousey would show the world that even if you get knocked down, you get back up. You fight and take back your championship.

Everybody held their breath when the bell rang. The match began. And everybody's jaws dropped in utter disbelief.

Nunes, Ronda's contender, threw the first punch. And the second. And the third. And all the punches of the 48-second match. Ronda, former undefeated champion, a hero to millions of fans, a queen that wasn't afraid to go into the masculine world of boxing and conquer, couldn't even throw a single punch in the whole match. You could as well say Nunes, was hitting a punching bag, not another boxer. Ronda, arms held in feeble fists at her waist, could only just stand there and take all the assault, let her face be beaten to a pulp.

Ronda is legendary, still a champion in my eyes. I would never be able to compare to her even after a million revolutions around the sun (let's just say sports and I exist in different universes). But I saw little glimpses of myself in her when I heard her story and watched the match.

I wasn't undefeated. Still, up until the first term of Grade 11, I had dominated the top spot on our Top Ten list. My name was on the first-place position exactly 7 times in the 10 trimesters of school we had. School was the only thing I could try to excel at, the most important thing in my life at that point. I lived behind my books. I didn't define myself as "smart" or any such thing, I was just the one that worked hard to get the best grades. More than anything, I knew myself as a hard worker, so whenever I didn't make that top spot, it wasn't because of any intrinsic intellectual ability that I couldn't control, it was because I just didn't work hard enough that term.

When I didn't make the spot in the second term of Grade 11, I thought I would be able to quickly get myself back up there in the last term, but I lost that one to Richard too.

Have you ever felt like Ronda Rousey after her first defeat? In other words, have you ever had your self-definition shaken?

Say for instance you've grown up being called pretty or handsome. You parents bragged about how your face could be picked to model for world class magazines. At school, all the guys and/or girls fought to be called your bae. You knew yourself as one thing: beautiful. Then suddenly, somebody says they would rather die alone than be with somebody as ugly as you.

Maybe you've known yourself as a good chef your entire adult life. Maybe you own multiple restaurants that are always fully booked with people who adore your exquisite cuisine. Maybe you've won multiple cooking awards all over the world. Then suddenly, everybody starts hating your food. They start spitting your food after one bite, and standing up to leave your restaurant. All the news outlets starts saying you've lost your flair, and you just can't do it as you did before. And eventually, your once packed restaurants become emptier than Antarctica.

Maybe you're an Olympic runner and you find yourself suddenly losing races to 15-year-old boys who spend their afternoons kicking soccer balls in their backyards. Maybe your renowned surgeon, and you find yourself not being able to do the simplest operations and leaving scalpels in patients. Maybe you are a celebrated hairstylist, and you suddenly find yourself not even able to cut a decent bob.

Have you ever had anything remotely similar to this happen in your life? Then maybe you remember how desperate you felt to find yourself again. Maybe you remember how you immediately went home, took 700 Instagram selfies to prove to yourself and to others that you still got it. Maybe you remember how you pulled all-nighters trying to recreate your best meals just so you could show them you're still a good chef. Maybe you remember how you started practicing 10 times harder, how you started re-reading your medical school books, or how you bought a dozen manikins and started styling their hair for practice.

When Grade 11 ended, and I had missed my top spot twice, I'll admit, I got desperate. Who was I if not the top student?

"I put in a decent amount of effort into my final exams. Why did I miss it? Maybe I didn't work hard enough. Maybe there's something I missed. Maybe I wasted too much time going to the stadium for running. Maybe all this prefect stuff has been distracting me. Maybe I should be working smarter and not harder."

Then, you know how they say desperate times lead to desperate measures? I hate how true that is. Desperate times lead to unrealistic hopes, outrageous dreams, and reckless decisions. A scramble to get back to better times as quickly as possible. And just like in quicksand, the desperate struggle just makes you sink deeper into whatever caused your desperation in the first place.

It was in that December of 2013 that I told myself, "It's okay. I'm going to work harder than ever to get the top spot in the country. So yeah, he can go ahead enjoy his win for now. It won't matter anyway." I wonder if Ronda told herself she was going to come back stronger than ever...

And then I started with the reckless decisions and the desperate arrogance. Would you guess how I thought I was going to work hard for that top spot? I thought that what I had to do was to become a genius in the 9 months before the national exams. And how would I become a genius you ask? You see that's where the sheer arrogance came in. My plan, I kid you not, was to read all the university level books that I could get my hands on for all the subjects I have, even though the university material had little or nothing to do with my own school work.

I took all my dad's old engineering physics and math books, I found a random university biology book, I went out and bought myself university level accounting and computer books, and I got the most difficult Afrikaans dictionary I could find. Upcoming geniuses spare no expenses you know. (No, Nelu, idiots waste money on useless books).

Would you guess what I proceeded to do for the rest of that December and the whole of my first Grade 12 term? My actual school work took second place, and I spent all my time trying to understand the Chinese that was going on in all those university books all on my own. I had to spend hours re-reading those physics equations to understand them by a fraction. And would you look at that, I didn't even need to know how to calculate the curvature of soap bubble for my Grade 12 physical science syllabus.

I also decided I would stop going to run with my police friends over at the stadium because you know, upcoming geniuses spare no time, and I would instead just pedal on the elliptical for 30 minutes while reading on the structure of the mitochondria of the coccobacillus bacteria in the Congo river. Was that on my biology syllabus? Just on the part that was non-existent, yeah.

Somehow, I managed to find enough free time to study my second-class non-genius level school work for my first term exams. During the exams, I particularly remember, dozing off right in the middle of my math paper, because I had spent too much time the previous day, studying some bizarre engineering math equations.

We got our reports after the exams, and not only was I second on the top ten list, but for the very first time, I got an average below A.