RONDA Rousey has every reason to be cranky.

Curled up on a couch in a black dress inside The Darling Hotel in Sydney, the most dominant fighter on the planet is clearly jet-lagged.

Halfway through a whirlwind trip to Australia to promote her upcoming fight at UFC 193 in Melbourne in November, Rousey has barely slept.

In a 72-hour window she’ll make live appearances on The Project, Sunrise and The Footy Show, prerecord chats with A Current Affair, Nova’s Fitzy & Wippa and Fox Sports News and complete a further 25 separate interviews with various media outlets.

So trepidation levels are high as you shake her hand, sit down opposite her and wonder what chance you have of asking a series of questions she hasn’t answered countless times already today.

You’ve been warned she isn’t expecting to be filmed during this round of interviews but try your luck and ask if she’d mind.

“Is there cappuccino on my face?” Rousey asks, having just knocked down a coffee. “No? We’re all good then.”

A make-up artist begs to differ and jumps in to apply a quick touch-up. Rousey takes mock offence. “I didn’t even ask, I’m like, ‘Really, I’m fine.’ She’s like, ‘No, you need it.’ F***, do I look that bad? Pull yourself together woman. Have some pride!”

You’re immediately put at ease and the star quality that has made this 28-year-old the highest paid athlete in an organisation that only allowed women to start competing a few years ago becomes apparent.

Rousey’s popularity knows no bounds at the moment. This month ESPN ran a vote to decide the greatest female athlete in history. From a list of 32 athletes — which included the likes of Martina Navratilova, Florence Griffith Joyner and Steffi Graf — it was reduced to a final featuring tennis champion Serena Williams and Rousey.

More than 13,000 people voted on the last pairing and Rousey won with 52 per cent of the vote. She beat Serena Williams. In the middle of the US Open where the dominant news story was Williams’ quest for a Grand Slam. Popular? Yeah, Rousey’s popular.

“It’s pretty nuts,” Rousey says. “Sometimes it’s hard for me to even accept things like that.”

GROWING up in California, Rousey was always told she was special. “My dad told me I was going to win the Olympics or be president or do whatever I want,” she says. “I always believed him — why wouldn’t I? Your dad’s always right about everything, right?”

But she never anticipated this level of stardom. Not when she won a bronze medal in judo at the 2008 Olympics. Not when she won her first mixed martial arts fight. Never. “Ten years ago I would be really surprised if you told me where we’d be right now. I’d be pretty happy about it but I probably wouldn’t believe you.”

Since becoming the undisputed star of the UFC and featuring in films like Entourage, Rousey’s fame has gone to another level. She takes the good — like the new home and cars she’s bought — with the bad, like the difficulty in going out publicly with her family.

“There’s a lot that comes with it that I didn’t really expect. But I got what I asked for. I try my best to never complain about it.”

There’s no single reason why Rousey has blown up like she has. “I guess I’m doing well but it’s kind of hard to say why,” she says. “What I do well is I delegate things I’m not good at to people who are the best at it. So I think it’s about having a good team around you of people you can trust and not try to do everything yourself.”

So how big is your team now? “Define my team,” Rousey asks. How many people’s bills do you pay? “All their bills or just a little bit?” Either, we say. She starts counting on her fingers, quickly moving from one hand to the next. “Like 10?”

Ronda Inc. is growing fast as she looks to complete the transition from UFC darling to Hollywood star. “I guess the closest model I have to follow is The Rock,” she says. “It’s a little different, but it’s the closest model I have.”

TWO hours later around 500 fans pack into the State Theatre on Market St for a question-and-answer session with Rousey and the three other women sharing headline duties in Melbourne.

They range in age from young to very young, from beginner-level fighters looking for advice to men who should know better looking for romance.

The roof almost lifts off when Rousey takes her place on stage alongside UFC boss Dana White, her upcoming opponent Holly Holm and the two ladies who will square off for the strawweight belt in Melbourne — Polish champion Joanna Jedrzejczyk and her Canadian challenger Valerie Letourneau.

Rousey is still wearing the black dress from earlier, which makes her immediately stand out because all the other women are in jeans. It also makes sitting on a stool a challenge.

“Am I flashing everyone right now?” Rousey asks the crowd. “Because I feel like I am and I feel you guys would just let it happen. These stools were a terrible idea.”

Rousey can be a little rough around the edges but in a way so is her audience. When a young girl asks her who she would choose if she could spend one day in another person’s body, Rousey responds: “I’d be a koala. They’ve all got chlamydia so you know they’re having fun.”

But rough humour like that is spliced with motivational gems like, “Give up what you want now for what you want most,” and to a young woman who is so overwhelmed about speaking directly to her idol she breaks down in tears, “It’s okay to cry, I cry before I fight, it just means you care.”

Two fans ask Rousey to scrawl her signature on their ribcages so they can visit a tattoo parlour afterwards and have it permanently marked on their bodies. Who said the selfie had made the signature redundant?

White knows he has a once-in-a-generation talent on his hands.

He’s had big stars before. Chuck Liddell achieved crossover fame in the US and Georges St Pierre and Anderson Silva were transcendent talents inside the ring. But no UFC fighter has been as big as Rousey.

“The way she’s broken through — it’s amazing,” he tells news.com.au. “She’s the biggest star we’ve ever had.”

Without a comparable star in his stable of current or former athletes, the example White now uses to describe Rousey’s level of fame is Mike Tyson, only “she’s not attacking people and going crazy”.

The key difference between Rousey and Tyson is how eminently manageable she is.

“Normally it’s a f***ing nightmare to manage somebody like her,” White says. “But the thing with Ronda Rousey is, the more rich and famous she gets, the easier she is to deal with. It’s not supposed to be like that. It’s always the complete opposite. Any of these guys, if they get this much fame, this much money, they lose their mind. Ronda is the exact opposite.”

Rousey’s popularity shows up in the number of people who are prepared to pay to watch her fight — both live and on pay-per-view. But it’s also the media outlets who are inviting her for appearances, like talk show host Ellen DeGeneres.

“Ellen’s never having another one of our fighters on ever again, you know what I mean?” White says.

“Ronda will probably be the only fighter from the UFC who is ever on Ellen.”

IT’S become a running joke within the UFC that White’s greatest success has come from what was initially an oversight.

After witnessing first-hand a horribly mismatched all-female mixed martial arts bout, White declared women would never fight in his organisation.

White didn’t think the public had an appetite for watching two women beat each other to a pulp, but the interest Rousey was building in her fights with rival promotion Strikeforce told another story.

This woman was different. And soon White knew he had to have her. “She’ll fight anyone, anywhere, anytime,” White says. “She’s mean. She’s nasty. She doesn’t just want to beat you, she wants to destroy you. She comes out of that tunnel with bad intentions.

“Then on the flipside, she’s beautiful. She’s got unbelievable charisma. She’s intelligent. She’s literally the whole package.”

The UFC didn’t just sign Rousey, they built a women’s division around her. The first card she headlined, at the Honda Centre in Anaheim, California, in February, 2013, broke pay-per-view and live gate records for a female combat sports event.

“She blew everything else out of the water,” White said. “So I knew immediately what I had.”

Two and a half years later the women’s divisions have developed so quickly White has the confidence to headline his first stadium show in Australia with two female fights.

It’s going to be another big windfall for the company — and its biggest star. “Ronda can retire right now and never do anything again and be OK with the money she’s made,” White says. “But she’s going to make a lot more money before she retires.”