For the past month, rumors have been swirling about a possible comeback for the former UFC women’s Bantamweight champion and crossover megastar, Ronda Rousey, after she shared snippets of her recent training
sessions online. Even UFC CEO Dana White admitted he’s been impressed with his former superstar’s renewed intensity.
But while fans might want to believe a return is brewing, Rousey insists she’s not staging a comeback (yet)— she’s simply rediscovering her love for the sport that once defined her.
“I have a cage in my garage. It’s not like I went anywhere,” Rousey told The Breakfast Club recently. “I’m just having fun with it again. It got to a point where it kind of got hijacked from me, and I was fighting and training for reasons other than my own. I think after having my last baby, being pregnant is f—king tough. It felt like I was handicapped just compared to being a finely tuned athletic machine, where I feel like I can do anything, to suddenly I think if I did a forward roll, I would throw my back out.
“That’s just where it started, I wanted to get my bodily identity back from just being a vessel for creating another person,” Rousey added. “Just get that freedom of movement back. I started training MMA again because I feel like I kind of lost that identity as being a fighter. I think it broke my heart too much to be anywhere near it because I love it so much. I kind of went to the extreme where I don’t want to train. I don’t want to do anything at all.”
Rousey’s departure from MMA in 2016 was abrupt and emotional. After suffering consecutive knockout losses to Holly Holm and Amanda Nunes, she vanished from the public eye without doing interviews, which rubbed fans the wrong way.
Now, nearly a decade later, she’s training again — not for a fight, but for herself.
Spoiler, nowhere in this interview is a “I’m coming back” — however, one interesting thing was said that could be taken as a hint, and that was her inspiration with Mike Tyson, who came out of retirement again to fight Jake Paul and broke all kinds of records.
“Mike Tyson coming back and having the biggest fight last year, it just kind of proves that I don’t think anyone’s ever really done,” Rousey said. “With Mike Tyson, you can never say never now. Holy shit….He got $20 million. Baddest man on the planet. 108 million views. F—king comment whatever you want, that’s the most-watched fight of all time, and he was almost 60. That’s how much his legacy means. How much his name means. That was very inspiring.”
Rousey also addressed her neurological health, something that’s been her concern for years. She explained that her doctors initially told her she couldn’t “fight safely” due to concussion-like symptoms, but now have morphed into what she described as mini migraines that could cause temporary blindness if she’s struck in the head.
UFC veteran and current MMA analyst Din Thomas said recently that her head health would keep her from coming back.
BUT, Rousey revealed she got the good news from a doctor that there are things she can do about her neurological health, where “it’s not the nail in the coffin of being able to fight again.”
“It’s great news, but I don’t know what I’m going to do with that,” Rousey concluded.
