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Ronda Rousey Explains Her Difficulty Coping with UFC Demise, Shutting Down the Media

Why did former UFC bantamweight champion Ronda Rousey take her downfall so hard when she lost back-to-back bouts in the Octagon? Because her mom didn’t teach her how to lose.

Rousey credits her parents, and her mom in particular, with a lot of the wherewithal it took for her to forge a path to success. That doesn’t simply apply to her career in Judo, where Rousey followed in her mom’s footsteps, rising to the Olympic level to the tune of a Bronze Medal in the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. It also applies to the trail she blazed, smashing the door wide open for women in the UFC.

Now, she’s taking her career in another direction, emerging at the top of the game in the world of professional wrestling. Rousey made her WWE debut as one of the key players in the sports entertainment promotion’s cornerstone event of the year, WrestleMania 34. 

When Rousey rose to the top of the heap in the Octagon, she made a beeline for the precipice. Rousey was named the first female UFC champion when the promotion absorbed Strikeforce, and she then won six fights in a row, which made the fall from the peak all the more precarious.

Holly Holm knocked Rousey out in the UFC 193 main event in November of 2015 in Australia.

As Rousey said on Wednesday, she wasn’t prepared for that.

“One thing my mother never taught me was how to lose,” Rousey told director Peter Berg, who directed her in the coming film “Mile 22,” and presided over a question and answer session with her on Wednesday at CinemaCon.

“She’d say, ‘I want you to never entertain (losing) as a possibility. Let it suck. It deserves to suck.’”

Rousey followed the loss to Holm by getting knocked out even quicker by current UFC bantamweight champion Amanda Nunes a year later. She made it through her back-to-back disappointments spending a lot of time crying in the arms of her husband, fellow UFC veteran Travis Browne.

“I always wanted to be so tough. I found a way to make crying tough. My mom didn’t teach me how to deal with (losing). (So) I did a whole lot of crying, isolating myself. (Travis) held me and let me cry, and it lasted two years. I couldn’t have done it alone.”

This article first appeared at News – MMAWeekly.com

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