Ronda Rousey has been open in the past about her UFC career drawing to a close due to the amount of concussions she had received. However, in a recent interview, ‘Rowdy’ disclosed that the neurological issues stemmed back to her loss against Holly Holm.
The former UFC Bantamweight champion was one of the biggest stars in the promotion for many years, claiming the Bantamweight title in her promotional debut against Liz Carmouche at UFC 157 and defending the strap 5 times.
Rousey looked unbeatable as she headed into a contest against the unbeaten Holly Holm at UFC 193. To the surprise of many, Holm looked levels above Rousey from the first bell and stopped the long reigning champion in emphatic fashion in the second round.
The 37-year-old recently sat down with Valeria Lipovetsky and discussed the Holm bout, revealing the litany of issues she suffered prior to the contest. She said:
“(I was) out on my feet for the entire fight.
“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.”
She continued: “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.’”
The former champion has made no secret of the fact that her mental health took a huge turn following the loss to Holm, with some fans questioning her capabilities as a mixed martial artist. The backlash she received following the loss made Rousey feel like everything she had achieved over her career had diminished substantially. Feeling like she wanted to prove herself to those that were doubting her, Rousey returned just over a year later, only to be stopped in brutal fashion by Amanda Nunes 48 seconds into the contest.
“I know that I’m the greatest fighter that has ever lived, 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.”
Many athletes will reveal such injuries post-fight but for the former champion, she believed the narrative would be changed by the media and the complexity and severity of the story was something that could only be told in long form, not in a article.
“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 out of my head”
“And 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 I went into at that time.”
Rousey admitted that she had kept the secret under wraps for so long as she had the dream to compete in the WWE following her mixed martial arts run and knew that if the wrestling organization knew just how bad the concussions were, they likely would not have employed her.
You can watch her full interview with Valeria Lipovetsky, below:
