Steven Crowder and his crew recently took aim at Elliot Page’s viral boxing footage, and in doing so, they dragged up a memorable moment involving Ronda Rousey and her former boxing coach, Edmond Tarverdyan, that many combat sports fans may remember well.
The segment started with Crowder and his co-hosts reacting to footage of Elliot Page working the pads, which circulated online and drew widespread attention.
Crowder was quick to point out that pad work in boxing is among the easiest things to choreograph and that looking good on the mitts does not necessarily translate to what happens in an actual match.
To illustrate his point, Crowder brought up Ronda Rousey and the period when her team was pushing the narrative that she had transformed into a legitimate boxer. Footage surfaced at the time of Rousey looking sharp working with Tarverdyan, with her coach heaping on the praise and encouragement during the session. It was a polished and convincing display that had many people genuinely impressed.
However, Crowder quickly cut to what happened when Rousey stepped into the cage for real. Against Amanda Nunes, Rousey absorbed significant punishment and showed little of the boxing ability that the training footage had suggested she possessed.
The contrast between the pad work and the actual performance was stark, and it became one of the more discussed moments in MMA.
What made the Tarverdyan angle particularly pointed was a clip Crowder referenced where the coach could be heard yelling repeatedly during a fight, “Head movement, head movement, head movement, head movement.”
According to Crowder, that frantic instruction came while Rousey was getting tagged.
Crowder was careful to note that none of this was meant to dismiss Rousey as an athlete overall. “She was an unbelievable judo athlete. She still was a very effective female athlete,” he said during the segment.
His argument was more narrowly focused on the way pad work and training footage can be framed to create a narrative that does not hold up under real competitive conditions.
His argument was that presenting a polished moment in a controlled setting, whether it is boxing footage or a physical transformation, does not tell the complete story. He drew a direct line between how Rousey’s boxing was once spoken about with great enthusiasm based on training clips and how Page’s recent footage was generating similar buzz online.
