Ronda Rousey was considered the greatest women’s mixed martial artist to ever live during her height in the sport. The judo specialist looked unstoppable, boasting a 12-0 record heading into her bout with Holly Holm, but the UFC 193 headliner was the beginning of the end for her career in the sport.
‘Rowdy’ would suffer a devastating head kick loss less than one minute into the second round, losing her undefeated streak and women’s bantamweight title in the process. Although it occurred over eight years ago, Ronda Rousey has now detailed exactly why she believes she lost on the night.
Recent reports are suggesting that Rousey had been suffering from concussions throughout her UFC career and she has now spoken about her struggles in a recent interview.
“I was so done fighting after that loss [to Holly Holm],” Rousey said in an interview with Valeria Lipovetsky. “I’d had so many concussions, I literally couldn’t take a jab without getting a concussion at that point.”
“I got to the point where I just neurologically wasn’t fit to fight anymore. I’d given everything that I had until my body and mind started to fall apart. And when I couldn’t give anything anymore, they hated me for it.”
“I felt like I had to come back for another fight because I felt like I owed it to the fans and everyone that believed in me. Maybe I needed to give them an example of overcoming adversity.”
“It was to the point where the next fight, the first time I got touched I was out on my feet. It was so hard because I’d never been faster, never been stronger, never had a better grasp of the game. I’d never been so much better than everybody else.”
“Your brain doesn’t callous. It doesn’t heal back stronger after a break, it’s just an inevitable decline and I just couldn’t keep fighting at that level anymore.”
She later insisted that said brain injury, alongside a faulty mouthguard, cost her the fight against Holly Holm.
“My mouth guard was bad. I literally came into that fight concussed from slipping down some stairs already after all these years of concussions.”
“Then, I had an absolutely terrible weight cut, which means you have less fluid in your brain to protect it.”
“I was just trying to make it look like I wasn’t hurt, but I wasn’t there cognitively. I couldn’t think as fast. I couldn’t judge distance, and just from that one fight, everybody felt like, ‘Oh, she’s a fraud.'”
Ronda Rousey later stated that she was desperate to make the fans happy, though has felt the brunt of how fickle people can be once you lose.
“I know that I’m the greatest fighter that has ever lived,” Rousey claimed. “But when it got to a point where I’d just taken so much neurological damage that I couldn’t take it anymore, suddenly everything that I accomplished meant nothing.”
“So then after that second fight, and I saw how all these people that I was coming back to fight for had suddenly turned against me, all of my appreciation for them turned into resentment, and I just didn’t want to have anything to do for them and with them anymore.”
“I didn’t want to do anything for them anymore, because I gave them everything that I had and they hated me for not being able to give them more.”
According to Rousey, her reasoning for not disclosing her problems much sooner was solely to protect her career.
“I think people would have thought I was just making excuses. And I couldn’t say anything after the first fight, because I’d literally just be putting a target on my head.”
“After the second fight, I didn’t want to say anything to anyone, because the media were just trying to sensationalize everything and chop everything up into a headline.”
“They weren’t trying to help me tell my story, and it’s the kind of thing I think that could only have been told in a book. Only in that long form, because there was just so much that happened, and so much that went into at that time.”
Related: Ronda Rousey compares WWE and UFC fanbases
Her concussions were so bad that she believes WWE would have never allowed her to compete in professional wrestling had they known the severity of it.
“Then I also wanted to go into WWE, that they have a very complicated history with concussions in CTE and things like that, and if they knew how bad it was, I don’t think they ever would have hired me.”
“If they knew that I was getting concussions from an open hand slap from Stephanie McMahon or Nikki Bella, they wouldn’t allow me to perform.”
“So I had to keep these things to myself, to keep my destiny in my own hands, and to be able to make my own decisions, because if my coach or Dana [White] knew how bad things had gotten, they would have made me retire, and I wasn’t ready.”
Watch the entire Ronda Rousey interview below.
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