By Case Keefer

Thu, Dec 29, 2016 (2 a.m.)

Ronda Rousey’s likeness flashed across the screen outside of T-Mobile Arena alongside the UFC 207 tagline of, “She’s back.”

Anyone inside the venue on Wednesday afternoon could have been fooled. The pixelated mug was the only Rousey sighting at UFC 207’s media day, as the former women’s bantamweight champion stuck to her self-imposed moratorium on making any public media appearances.

The only chance fans will have to hear from Rousey ahead of Friday night’s pay-per-view main event bout against current champion Amanda Nunes is on the “Embedded” series. And even her segments on that UFC in-house production are glaringly limited to small pockets of availability.

“I don’t care about anything except for winning this fight,” Rousey said on the second episode of the show, “and I’m not spending energy on anything else.”

The fighter who partook in the most media of anyone in the history of the UFC before her first fight will do a record-low in what might be her last fight. The UFC kicked Conor McGregor off a card for refusing to attend one news conference earlier this year, but it’s allowing Rousey to refrain from all media obligations.

“I don’t know why this is the way she’s handling all of this, but this is what she wanted to do,” UFC President Dana White said. “And like I said a million times, a woman that’s given this much time to this sport and this company, it’s really not that much to ask for.”

White had been reclusive in his own way over the last couple years, scrapping a post-media day chat with reporters that was once a cornerstone of fight weeks. Picking UFC 207 to break the hiatus felt a lot like flailing punches Rousey threw in the second round before getting knocked out by Holly Holm in her most recent fight in November 2015.

They were both desperate attempts to win back something that was already lost.

“This is because Ronda Rousey isn’t here,” White said of reviving his traditional pre-fight media scrum. “No, this was not my idea.”

The return of the greatest female fighter in the history of mixed martial arts after a loss that ravished her perceived invincibility will never be as big as it should have been. Rousey’s hiding has made it that way, with her limited visibility cutting down on the number of potential viewers.

But her erratic behavior has also made it more intriguing for those who were going to be watching anyway. Rousey is nothing if not convincing.

If she were making the rounds as normal, she would have convinced everyone by now that Nunes didn’t stand a chance. Or she might not have even needed to.

Rousey’s presence and swagger would have reminded the masses just how dominant she’s been throughout her whole career with the exception of the Holm fight, a dominance Nunes hasn’t come close to matching. The betting line, which opened with Rousey favored at minus-220 (risking $2.20 to win $1) would likely be creeping toward Rousey as a minus-300 favorite instead of its current trajectory of closing as a pick’em.

The shift is because of questions over Rousey’s mental state. Perhaps that would be a concern either way after suffering a devastating head-kick knockout to Holm.

But it’s a lot harder to wonder if she doubts herself when she’s ranting about “do-nothing bitches” and threatening to tear apart opponents limb by limb.

“I think it’s creating more mystique behind Ronda,” said Dominick Cruz, who defends his own bantamweight title against Cody Garbrandt in the co-main event of UFC 207. “People want to see how she comes back, and it almost adds a different level of curiosity in the fact of, will she come back better without all this media in her face?”

It’s no surprise Rousey wants it out of her face after all the criticism and ridicule that came her way following the loss to Holm. She became another example of the ugly reality that some people delight over others’ pain; she became a meme.

But she brought a portion of it on herself by building her name through being unapologetically brash. It’s too bad she hasn’t heeded by her own original message of empowerment and stood tall in the face of adversity.

The entire situation smacks of hypocrisy, from the UFC exempting Rousey from rules other fighters must follow to Rousey herself disappearing when times get tough.

“She’s in amazing shape, she’s in great spirits, she’s fired up,” White said. “She’s like the old Ronda again, but she just had to deal with this thing the way she wanted to deal with it.”

Until Friday, everyone will just have to choose to take White’s word for it or deem him a liar. By White’s own admission, the situation isn’t ideal.

But it just might have made the fight even more interesting.

Case Keefer can be reached at 702-948-2790 or [email protected]. Follow Case on Twitter at twitter.com/casekeefer.

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