Sharice Davids Quotes

To go from hit-and-miss promotions barely taking women's fighting seriously to women headlining on a regular basis, high-level fights, it's an amazing thing to see. And it happened in what I felt was a pretty quick succession - though not fast enough - as far as professional sports go. It's really exciting.

Women's MMA has come a really long way. People look forward to us fighting, and they get excited.

It's great to see there's a push behind women's MMA because everyone who's involved in women's MMA is very passionate about it.

Ronda Rousey changing the game for MMA, you know? Dana White said he'd never have a girl in the Octagon. Ronda Rousey comes along, and she's the main event any time she's on. The women, I feel, in the UFC are stealing the show.

Ronda Rousey, arguably... I mean, she might've been the one that actually started the whole 'Divas Revolution' by being so awesome in UFC.

I'm a woman who's been in a man's sport since the age of 15, and to see people finally seeing what I saw right from the start, that female fighters are just as good 'pound-for-pound' as our male counterparts.

A big misconception is that women shouldn't be in the UFC because we fight 'like girls,' but I think women have some of the most exciting fights.

Women's combat sports have been on a good run in the United States. Claressa Shields won a gold medal in women's boxing at the London Olympics in 2012, when it became a medal sport. American women won medals in taekwondo and judo as well.

You can have a fight card full of male fights, but yet when that women's fight comes on, that's what people watch. They're super excited by it.

I look up to and have learned a lot from the women before me. With that said, there has never been a woman in this ring with the experience that I have in fighting.

In the age of millennials, women's rights, and female empowerment, I hope my voice helps to encourage the next generation of great female athletes and golfers to possibly stop social injustices and prejudices from creeping into the game that I fell in love with at such a young age.

People like myself have been pushing, competing, and promoting female MMA for a long time, and to see the fans accept a female division in the UFC so quickly is vindication that all that hard work amounted to something.

I like to watch women's MMA more than men fighting because they always do their best and fight hard.

I think the legacy Ronda leaves behind is that she changed women's MMA.

One thing about WOW that I love is that we're taking women from all different parts of life. We have girls from jiu jitsu and an MMA background. We have mothers. We have students. We have people from everyday life who found this love for professional wrestling.

I fight for the women. I try to do my best inside the Octagon to fight like a man; then, people will respect girls in the Octagon.

I never hated Ronda. She's always talked about me; she did that to promote herself because when she started, nobody knew her, and she talked about me for people to know who she is. And she opened the doors for women's MMA.

When I was growing up, you didn't know there was a women's national team. Now girls grow up dreaming of playing for Canada.

In the seventies we had to make it acceptable for people to accept girls and women as athletes. We had to make it okay for them to be active. Those were much scarier times for females in sports.

Can you do inter-gender matches? Ronda Rousey and our match at Wrestlemania - sure, it can be done. Women don't need a man in their match to steal the show. They just need an equal platform and opportunity, and if the women have it, they will work just as hard, if not harder, than anybody else to steal that show.

In the United States, female fisticuffs were marginalized, first as erotic vaudeville in the 19th century and later as serious competition developed in the first half of the 20th. Legal wars waged by boxers in the 1960s and '70s won women the right to compete professionally nationwide.

I didn't want to walk into WWE and be someone who just does bikini matches and played second fiddle to the guys. I wanted to stand out, make people excited to see women's wrestling, and show them we can be better than the men.

Especially with the ladies' game, I have proved we can compete with all these men.

What we do is not easy. And if someone like Ronda Rousey wants to come and be a part of what we do, and that's her passion? That's awesome.

The women's national team is a very successful team, and that success has given us a platform to speak on gender equity issues. Millions of young women play soccer in this country, and it's empowering for them to see that our contribution to the game is valued.