Ronda Rousey is coming back, but despite her best efforts, she won’t be fighting in the UFC.
Nearly a decade after she last set foot in the cage, the former UFC women’s bantamweight champion is returning to MMA for a showdown against fellow legend Gina Carano in a fight taking place at 145 pounds with the event airing live on Netflix. But Rousey’s return was immediately met with more than a few questions including why she’s not competing in the UFC where she was a champion and a Hall of Famer.
“I reached out to Dana [White] and asked if he would be interested in it,” Rousey revealed in an interview with ESPN. “It didn’t exactly work out with the UFC, but it led us to here today.”
This past October, White addressed Rousey getting back in the gym and saying she was finding her passion for MMA again after leaving the sport in 2016 following two straight knockout losses.
“I think she’s just training again,” White said at the time. “She just had three babies and she’s in a whole other place in her life. But I will say this, she just had another baby and she’s in great shape right now. She’s freaking ripped like she used to be. I don’t know.”
Obviously, Rousey decided that she wanted to compete again but she says the only option for her comeback was the matchup against Carano after the UFC actually explored booking that fight as far back as 2014.
Rousey explained that Carano was really the driving force behind everything that led to this fight, which is now being promoted by Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions.
“I was nine months pregnant, and I saw a video of Gina Carano giving an interview and she didn’t look good,” Rousey said. “She gained an unhealthy amount of weight and my first thought was ‘oh my god, what can I do to help?’ The reason why I had that thought was because she’s the one woman not only in MMA that doesn’t owe me a damn thing but that I owe immensely. I’m always trying to look out what I could do for her.
“When I was in a similar spot and depressed and gave up on the world and invertly gave up on myself, what I needed was a goal and something to reignite my passion again. I always said that Gina’s the one person that I would come back to fight for. I thought you know what, she needs this. She needs this fight. The more I thought about it, I was like I need this. I really need this fight.”
While the fight was just announced on Tuesday, Rousey said talks about facing Carano date much further back but it just took time to strike a deal for the bout to happen.
Now the two MMA legends are scheduled to clash at the Intuit Dome in Inglewood, Calif. with Netflix airing the fight live to more than 300 million subscribers.
“This has been in the making since I was pregnant, which is over a year ago,” Rousey said. “It took a long time to get us here. We fought for this. We fought to fight each other. There were a lot of obstacles along the way.
“I told her, if I have to go out there, and train you myself to fight me, I will. We made it happen. We had to work together to overcome every obstacle to get here. It’s really surreal because it’s been a secret for so long, I can’t believe I’m actually able to talk about it.”
As far as fighting for the first time in almost a decade, Rousey didn’t seem too concerned about the time off or taking punches again after such a long layoff.
Of course, Rousey openly admitted that her career in the UFC largely ended after she dealt with repeated concussions and the longterm neurological issues that haunted her as a result. She didn’t address those concerns, but Rousey promises that the pressure mounting for her comeback is nothing she can’t handle.
“I’ve been to two Olympics. Nothing compares to that kind of pressure,” Rousey said. “To train your whole life for one day. Everything else just kind of pales in comparison.
“It’s so funny, people who have never fought they’re like ‘oh it must be such a big deal getting punched in the face.’ But when you’re actually fighting, it’s not like you have an opinion about it. It’s just an observation you have at the time. That’s not what’s scary. I feel like the pressure of the situation, the result is what really gives you anxiety, not the physical pain that could come out of it.”
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