Outside Source
Ronda Rousey was the key figure behind bringing women into the UFC. | Dave Mandel/Sherdog.com
While Ronda Rousey essentially convinced Dana White to allow women to fight in the Octagon more than a decade ago, she couldn’t persuade the UFC CEO to book a fight between her and Gina Carano in the world’s largest mixed martial arts promotion in the present day.
On Tuesday, Most Valuable Promotions announced that Rousey and Carano will square off in a featherweight bout at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles on May 16. The five-round contest will air on Netflix. According to the Olympic judoka, the bout has been in the works for quite some time.
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“I was nine months pregnant, and I saw a video of Gina Carano giving an interview and she didn’t look good,” Rousey told ESPN. “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.
“Her family owns Caesar’s Palace and Rebel Oil. There’s nothing I could really do for her except for when I was in a similar spot, when I was depressed and gave up on the world and inadvertently gave up on myself. What I needed was a goal and something to reignite my passion again. I always said that Gina is the one person I’d come back to fight for. I thought, ‘She needs this. She needs this fight.’ The more that I thought about it, I thought, ‘I need this. I need this fight.’”
When Rousey was at the peak of her powers in the UFC in 2014, White confirmed that there were discussions to bring Carano into the Las Vegas-based promotion for a high-profile fight between the two female stars. However, more than 10 years later, White and the UFC apparently weren’t interested in revisiting that booking.
“I reached out to Dana and asked if he would be interested in it,” Rousey said. “It didn’t exactly work out with the UFC, but it led us to here today.”
According to Rousey, it took some time to make the fight against Carano a reality.
“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.”
Train Smarter, Not Harder
Rousey hasn’t fought since stepping away from the UFC following a loss to Amanda Nunes in 2016. The former bantamweight queen sparked rumors of a comeback by posting a series of training videos in recent months while stating that she was “finding my love” for MMA again. “Rowdy” admits that the approach is different than when she was one of the UFC’s biggest stars.
“Recovery is a lot more important. I may not have as much collagen or cartilage as I had in the past,” Rousey said. “But I have more knowledge than I ever have. I feel like it’s my technique and my wittiness that always set me apart. It’s why whenever I get my hands on somebody, they never get up again. I’ve never been better in that way. We had to kind of change training around, instead of doing multiple trainings a day, I just do one marathon training a day, and I spend the rest of the day recovering. It’s really hard warming up twice in a day when you’ve had as many athletic careers as myself.”
As far as finding the right mindset to return to MMA, Rousey says it isn’t that difficult thanks to an athletic background that has been filled with high-pressure situations.
“I’ve been to two Olympics. Nothing compares to that kind of pressure. To train your whole life for one day. Everything else just kind of pales in comparison,” Rousey said.
“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.”
This article first appeared at Recent News on Sherdog.com
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