Ronda Rousey didn’t just face pressure heading into perhaps the biggest fight of her career at UFC 193. She stepped into the octagon that day still dealing with a serious head injury.
In an interview with YouTuber Valeria Lipovetsky released Tuesday, Rousey, 37, admitted she was concussed just before she suffered a devastating head-kick knockout against Holly Holm in the second round of their 2015 women’s bantamweight title fight in front of more than 56,000 fans at then-Etihad Stadium in Melbourne, Australia.
As Rousey put it so bluntly, “I was out on my feet for the entire fight.”
“My mouth guard was bad,” Rousey added. “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.”
Rousey’s admission comes after she recently revealed a years-long history of concussions throughout her career, dating back to her amateur judo career and even after MMA while she competed in WWE.
Prior to the Holm fight, Rousey was a media darling as she became one of the UFC’s biggest stars while defending her women’s bantamweight championship six consecutive times in two-and-a-half years. Immediately after UFC 193, Rousey didn’t attend the post-fight news conference and never addressed the loss.
Heading into her comeback fight vs. Amanda Nunes on Dec. 30, 2016, Rousey stayed silent by skipping all pre-UFC 207 media obligations. After she lost to Nunes by standing TKO in just 48 seconds on Dec. 30, 2016, Rousey’s media mutiny continued and she eventually retired from MMA without a formal announcement.
While her health was the primary reason for her abrupt MMA retirement, Rousey said the fan backlash of being called a “fraud” after her two losses also didn’t motivate her to want to get back in the cage.
“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,” Rousey said. “So then after that second fight (vs. Nunes), 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 wanto 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.”
In addition to wanting to continue her career, which she did for five years with WWE after leaving the UFC, Rousey understood the negative optics she’d have faced by coming clean about her concussion history immediately after her losses to Holm and Nunes. That’s why she waited until now – and in her autobiography, “Our Fight” – to open up about it.
“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,” Rousey said. “And after the second fight, I didn’t want to say anything to anyone because the media was 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.”
