Midnight Mania: ‘I’m The Greatest Fighter That Has Ever Lived!’ (2024)

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It’s been little more than seven years since Ronda Rousey stepped away from combat sports.

The Olympic bronze medalist in Judo took the mixed martial arts (MMA) world by storm, capturing the Strikeforce and then UFC women’s Bantamweight titles as an undefeated submission ace. She defended her UFC belt six times, all via stoppage and rose into the public eye as a result. Rousey was on top of the world prior to being upset by Holly Holm, then it all fell apart. She returned a year later, was knocked out once more by Amanda Nunes, and left the promotion for good.

Recently, Rousey has been doing the media circuit to promote her new memoir, Our Fight. A big reveal has been Rousey’s history of concussions, which really plagued her later career. In the interview above with Valeria Lipovetsky, Rousey talks about her health struggles and reflects on her abilities while at her peak.

“I felt like I had to come back for another fight, I felt like I owed it to the fans and everyone who believed in me,” Rousey began. “Maybe I needed to give them an example of overcoming adversity. It was to the point where the next fight when I got touched, I was out on my feet. It was so hard because I’d never been faster, stronger, never had a better grasp on the game. I’d never been so much better than everyone else. But, your brain doesn’t callous, it doesn’t help back stronger after a break. It was an inevitable decline.

“I had taken punishment until I couldn’t take it anymore. When it got to the point that I couldn’t take it anymore, I was vilified as ‘She was all hype, she was just lucky.’ People making all these judgements about me in a fight where my first loss, my mouth guard was bad, I literally came into that fight concussed from slipping down some stairs already after all these years of concussions. I had an absolutely terrible weight cut, which means you have less fluid in your brain to protect it.”

She continued, “I was out on my feet for the entire fight. I was trying to make it look like I wasn’t hurt, but I wasn’t there cognitively. I couldn’t think as fast or judge distance. Just from that one fight, everybody felt like, ‘Oh she’s a fraud.’ I know that like I’m the greatest fighter that has ever lived, but when it got to a point that I had taken so much neurological damage that I couldn’t take it anymore, suddenly everything I had accomplished meant nothing.”

She concluded, “Then after the second fight, I saw how all these people I was coming back to fight for had suddenly turned against me. All of my appreciation for them turned to resentment.”

Since retiring from MMA, Rousey has performed as a professional wrestler in the WWE. She was inducted into the UFC Hall of Fame in 2018.

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