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After barely uttering a word about them for over the past seven-plus years, Ronda Rousey now can’t stop talking about her final two fights in the UFC – both knockout losses.
Last week, Rousey explained that a series of concussions that she kept hidden contributed to her downfall as a MMA fighter.
She also claimed that two weeks prior to her UFC 193 title loss to Holly Holm she slipped down a flight of stairs, knocked herself unconscious and suffered an ACL injury.
Rousey added that she entered the octagon that night with the wrong mouthguard as well.
“The first time I got touched in that fight, it knocked all my bottom teeth loose and I was completely out on my feet the entire fight,” she told Cageside Seats.
On Tuesday, in an interview with YouTuber Valeria Lipovetsky, Ronda Rousey went into much more detail about her concussions and the reasons why she was knocked out in less than a minute in each of her last two UFC fights.
“My mouthguard was bad,” Rousey told Lipovetsky. “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.’”
Despite those devastating losses, Ronda Rousey is still feeling herself.
“I know that I’m the greatest fighter that has ever lived,” she said. “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 wanna 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.”
It’s somewhat understandable that Rousey, sitting at 12-0 in MMA and on top of the world, wouldn’t want to reveal any weaknesses, but even so, she full-well knew that she was taking a monumental risk with her own health by continuing to fight if what she claims is true. (Rousey claimed that she was “getting concussions from an open hand slap from Stephanie McMahon or Nikki Bella” when she joined WWE.)
“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,” Rousey said. “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.”
Oh, right. Did we mention that she has a new book out?
Hear what else Ronda Rousey had to say in her very lengthy interview with Lipovetsky below…