When it comes to blaming her old coach, Ronda Rousey is several years late to the party.
Despite warnings from her own mom, the Olympian stuck with head coach Edmond Tarverdyan for the majority of her professional MMA career, which seemed like the right call when the former UFC bantamweight champion was steamrolling the competition at 135 pounds.
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
But then came back-to-back losses to Holly Holm and Amanda Nunes, fights that saw Rousey get completely dominated on the feet.
Suddenly, all that talk about gold medals and magazine covers sounded as crazy to fans as it did to the last fighter to knock her out.
Expect a new and improved “Rowdy” when Rousey returns to competition on May 16.
“I’m definitely better than I’ve ever been and it just really helps so much that the landscape of the sport has changed,” Rousey said on MVP Uncut. “People forgot that when I was competing before, there were no coaches with MMA experience. There was no one with MMA experience with coaching experience and so usually, the person with the most MMA experience on the team was the fighter, and everybody else had their own separate discipline, and it was up to the fighters themselves, trying to piece things together. Now, finally with this camp, I have help with that.”
Concussions walked so that coaches could run.
“You look me in the Olympics, I was fighting chicks that were a head taller than me,” Rousey continued. “I came into MMA at 145 (pounds) because that was the ’it’ division, because it was an echo of Gina’s legacy. And I was a head shorter than all those chicks, too! And I’m not just guessing, you know, and having to go and spar over and over and over again and try and piece things together and figure things out. Us, as a team, are actually developing all of this together. What set me apart is my technique, and how skilled I am as a martial artist and I’ve never been more skilled. And technique’s never been better and I’ve never had a better and higher fight IQ. And this is definitely the best that I have ever been.”
Even with her migraine aura.
Rousey, 39, is likely referring to Hard Knocks Fighting Championship (HKFC) opponent Charmaine “Not Too Sweet” Tweet, who stands 6’0” with a 71” reach. Outside of that, the 5’7” Rousey was the taller fighter in nine of her 14 pro fights and taller than all three of her amateur MMA opponents.
Gina Carano, her opponent for the upcoming Netflix MMA event in Los Angeles, is 5’8”.
