Ronda Rousey sits at a table in a spacious, modern kitchen, a bowl of cream of wheat reflecting in her thick-framed glasses. She feels the need to apologise for her bespectacled look; she’s been staring at a screen too long today, she explains, and our Zoom call will only extend that trend. In the background, her husband Travis walks by carrying one of their two young daughters, whisking her away so Rousey can speak without distraction.
She’s sitting in a house that her MMA career built. Some would argue modern MMA is the house that Ronda Rousey built.
In fairness, Rousey’s appearances on the big screen and in professional-wrestling rings helped to pay the mortgage; a cage-fighting career has never been the fairest financial endeavour. Yet Rousey was one of the trailblazers who set the precedent that the top stars, at least, can get paid something close to their worth in MMA.
If Conor McGregor was the thunder clap that reverberated around the wider world, Rousey was the preceding lightning bolt, scorching the earth beneath.
In her prime, fighting in Strikeforce and the UFC, Rousey was employing her Olympic medal-winning judo skills to ragdoll opponents and nearly break their arms. It was savage, captivating, and it usually happened in a matter of seconds: 25, 49, 25, 39, 54, 16, 14, 34. As the American went 12-0 in MMA, she only passed the first minute three times, and the first round once.
Some may cite Brock Lesnar, but there’s a genuine argument that Rousey was MMA’s first true crossover star. With endorsements from Beyonce and Tina Fey, and Will Smith and “Stone Cold” Steve Austin attending her fights, she arrived as social-media’s reach extended to unprecedented distances. So bewitchingly brutal was her offence, she even got Dana White to renege on a famous vow: that women would “never” fight in the UFC.
Rousey broke that barrier and went on to win gold, fill arenas and notch film credits in the Fast And Furious, Expendables and Entourage franchises. But as she filled an Australian stadium for her 2015 title defence against Holly Holm, in the biggest event in UFC history, her fighting career came crashing down. Rousey came crashing down, literally.
After getting knocked out early in the second round, she disappeared for a year, only for her return against Amanda Nunes to end in the same fashion, inside 50 seconds.
Rousey had twice found herself on the opposite end of the beatings she was accustomed to delivering, and many fans – with a familiar fickleness – swapped support for Schadenfreude. Some argued that Rousey’s brashness had veered into abrasiveness, and with the walls closing in, she escaped to Hollywood and the world of pro wrestling.
Now, 10 years on, a 39-year-old Rousey will fight again, facing a fellow trailblazer in Gina Carano on 16 May. As that Netflix fight looms, The Independent speaks to Rousey, Carano, promoter Nakisa Bidarian, and Yahoo/Uncrowned journalist Chuck Mindenhall about a career like no other.
The prime years
My first question to Rousey feels an obvious one, yet still I’m pleasantly surprised by the depth of her answer. What was it like to be Ronda Rousey during those peak years? “God, it was just insanity,” she sighs. “Just constant, non-stop insanity. I was just trying to keep laying down the tracks in front of this speeding train.
“I just felt like the whole world was on my shoulders, the whole women’s division, the whole industry. I had to do all the work. No one wanted to talk to my opponents, so I was promoting way harder than them, training way harder than them. I was just running on fumes at all times. I tried to be every thing to everyone. Every single person that wanted to stop me and take a picture or have a conversation, I wanted to validate them. But every single person is just stealing a little bit of energy from you, but I felt like I had to be the one who was able to do it.”
I can almost feel Rousey momentarily tire as she recalls this period of time. “I would just keep digging deeper and deeper and deeper until, every single day, I was dragging myself out of bed, and every single moment of the day, I was digging into the deepest wells of my motivation to keep going.”
“People don’t understand,” starts Bidarian, who is promoting Rousey vs Carano along with his business partner, the Jake Paul. “One of the things I look at closely is search trends… Put aside Conor McGregor vs Floyd Mayweather; in the US, Conor has never had the search interest of Ronda in terms of her peaks in her MMA career. That’s how big she is.”
Admittedly, it’s a very specific statistic, but then again, Bidarian is a promoter. Regardless, his next stat withstands any scrutiny: “If you look at social-media followings, it’s Conor, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Ronda – all-time. No one else comes close.”
Before venturing into fight promotion, Bidarian was actually CFO at the UFC, where he worked on her contracts. “She opened my eyes to what women’s sports can be, with the power she had.”
“There’s no real comparison,” adds Mindenhall. “We hadn’t seen big evidence that a woman could hold a male demographic’s attention. There was a switch in the male perspective, and also a female contingent now watching the sport. I remember talking to people in the streets, and there was something in the air. It was a little bit like when The Beatles were first appearing on TV.
“She was knocking down doors in media that would never look at MMA. ‘Wait a minute, this person represents this complete cross-cultural thing.’ At the very end, she was announcing her fights on Good Morning America, she was winning ESPN awards.”
Mindenhall also notes an extra element to Rousey’s “backstory”. When Ronda was just eight, her biological father tragically took his own life. Ron Rousey had suffered from depression after sustaining a back injury that failed to heal properly due to a rare blood disorder. “I’ve tried to remember something from the before part of that day – what my dad was wearing, what he looked like, what he sounded like,” his daugher wrote in her autobiography My Fight/Your Fight. “I wish I could remember the words he said to me before he walked out our front door. I can’t. I just remember what came after.”
The downfall – and the delight it brought
Rousey would readily accept she has the ability to aggravate. As such, there was no shortage of delight in her downfall, but there was also devastation when she was beaten by Holm.
And very few predicted the defeat, with Holm seen as “going in there like the steak being slid under the door”, Mindenhall says. Rousey was -900 at close, Holm +525. “It was one of the biggest upsets in UFC history, no matter what the revisionist history is,” stresses Mindenhall. “It’s still shocking. People were in denial; until she went down, people were like: ‘Oh, she’ll pull this out.’
“Clay Travis was saying [beforehand] she could beat Floyd Mayweather in a fight, the casual interest saw her as invincible in a Mike Tyson sense. For her to get destroyed in such a big moment was catastrophic in a sense. ‘Oh, my God, what does that mean for the sport?’ None of these women are fighting in the UFC if Ronda doesn’t exist.”
And before the Nunes fight? “You had the feeling it would be the nail in the coffin,” Mindenhall admits. “That clip of Holm was played for the full year, but it wasn’t just that she’d lost; her aura took the hit because of how she handled it. She basically went into a year-long power sulk, and she only came back on the stipulation that she could talk to hand-selected media. It just didn’t feel like she was right.”
Some of Rousey’s critics took issue with perceived excuses for her losses. Excuses or explanations? Either way, they arise when I ask Rousey if she was at peace with leaving MMA in 2017.
“I was having neurological issues, and I was getting hit and basically losing chunks of my vision, depth perception, ability to track moving objects, to think clearly,” she says. “I thought these were concussion symptoms, because the more concussions I got, the easier it was for me to get these symptoms. So, after my first loss, I was like: ‘F***, it’s finally caught up to me. I’m never gonna be able to compete at the highest level again.’
“But there were a lot of other factors. I had a bad mouthguard, stuff like that. My teeth got knocked loose, the very first punch of the [Holm] fight, so I convinced myself: ‘Maybe it was just that.’ I came back again, and again I had to drag myself through it, because I felt like I was expected to come back – and I was coming back for everybody else and not for me. But then the same thing: the first time I got hit, I couldn’t see.
“I just felt like I was forced to retire; there was no way I could safely compete at the highest level anymore. But it was also the toxicity of my training camp. The process wasn’t fun anymore, and I was just so over it. Everything was so result-oriented, and I wanted to enjoy the everyday and not just the possible results.
“That’s kind of what led me to pro wrestling, but I didn’t wanna go public about it, because I didn’t want WWE to be like, ‘We don’t wanna work with you,’ because of the baggage – they’ve had bad press from concussions in the past. So, I had to keep it to myself, but that’s kind of what forced my hand.”
An unexpected return
While nine months pregnant with her second daughter, Rousey was sat in an office chair, watching a video of Carano, when she decided to take a punt. The idea of a fight with her fellow Strikeforce legend was hers, she suggests, and she brought it to Bidarian and Paul at Most Valuable Promotions – but only after bring it to White at the UFC.
“Dana wanted to do it, too, for a period of time,” Bidarian says. “When that didn’t seem to be going forward, she reached out to me and said: ‘It’s incredible what you’re doing for women’s boxing, I’m trying to make this fight happen with Gina. Would you be interested?’ I said: ‘Absolutely, this is a no-brainer.’ You can criticise us all you want, you can say they’re not at the top of their careers, but this is a big, meaningful match-up in the world of combat sports.”
And so, Rousey and a 44-year-old Carano will headline at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, California, on 16 May. Rousey says it will be a one-and-done bout for her, unless it plays out in such a way as to demand a rematch.
What of her neurological issues, though?
“Fortunately, because Dana sent me to the Cleveland Clinic, we got a diagnosis for what was actually going on with me,” she explains. “They think it’s actually migraines, and they got me on preventative migraine medication, and we’ve been able to test with sparring and see that it works. It’s been absolutely life-changing for me.”
Okay, but what of the “insanity” of her fighting past? The “speeding train”?
“With this training camp, we’ve made the priority enjoying myself and finding the joy in martial arts again,” she says, “and that’s really brought the best out of me. It’s completely the opposite [feeling] now. I spring out of bed and I’m so excited every day, every training session.
“I’m even having a great time doing press, which is so funny, because it was just something I had to do before, because I had to accomplish these things. This time, I’m just reveling in the fact that I’m really good at this. But maybe that’s something I learned from pro wrestling.”
Even some of her most-passionate detractors are warming to her, I suggest, given her recent press-conference monologues, in which she has directed her brashness at the failings that have begun to disengage fans from the UFC.
“I wouldn’t say it’s unanimous, because the MMA media is sure s***ing on me, huh?” she laughs. Actually, I’d argue the media is receiving her quite positively, but we don’t have time to get into that on our call.
Carano’s two cents? “When I met her in person, I was like: ‘Oh, she’s nothing like what the internet says.’ I was really confused. She didn’t mind being the ‘heel’ [a pro-wrestling term for a villain] at times, but I asked her: ‘Why don’t you show people this side of you?’ She just likes to poke the bear sometimes, which I love!
“I think years from now, we’re gonna look back at this big ball of fiery energy. When she went off [at the second press conference], and you saw that passion, that’s so authentically raw and extremely beautiful to me. I wanted to stand up and start clapping! Ronda is a force to be reckoned with.”
Rousey’s next contribution is perhaps the most revealing of all.
“What I really care about is: people have very unique, passionate opinions about me,” she says. “I don’t want everybody to agree, because once you agree, the conversation’s over. I want my name to spark a conversation for someone to have one very passionate opinion, and another person to have another very passionate opinion. That’s what a lot of people don’t realise: it’s not your job to be liked, it’s your job to get people to watch your fights.”
Herein may lie evidence that Rousey’s historic ability to aggravate is not rooted in ignorance, but rather intention. She finishes: “I want my conflict on the screen to become a conflict on the couch, and whatever I’m doing on the screen resolves what’s happening on the couch.” On 16 May, make sure you’re on the couch with a conflict to resolve.
