Ronda Rousey is confident she would beat Holly Holm in a rematch even if it’s never going to happen.
Ahead of her lightweight title fight in boxing on Saturday, Holm addressed Rousey’s rapid-fire win over Gina Carano in her first action back in a decade and paid respect to her former opponent but admitted they’d probably never meet again. Holm shocked the world when she scored a brutal head-kick knockout on Rousey back in 2015 to claim the UFC bantamweight title while simultaneously handing the Olympic bronze medalist her first loss in MMA.
“I highly doubt she’ll ever want a rematch,” Holm told MMA Fighting. “I always have said since the minute the last fight was over, I’ll always rematch her. That’s always been available. But she wanted to come back and have this win and go back and enjoy and have a win like that. No hate from me. I hope she does well. I hope she does whatever she wants with her life. That’s her life. I’d always be open to fight her again.”
After her win over Carano in the first-ever MVP MMA event, Rousey quickly announced her retirement from the sport and insisted she’s much more interested in raising her family than fighting again. That said, Rousey believes she’s a much better fighter now than she was 10 years ago and a rematch with Holm would end differently than the first fight.
“I said I’m retired, A and B, I think that I am a completely different fighter now. I would clean her clock and definitely now that I got that new medication,” Rousey said on Up and Adams. “I took it before. I was diagnosed with cortical spreading depression, which was always happening in my last fights and basically why I was like I need to stop. I thought my concussions were catching up to me.
“This is the first fight where I was able to take it and when I spiked my head into the mat, that’s exactly the kind of thing that would have set me off before. I would have lost big chunks of my vision and it didn’t come back at all. It ended up working perfectly in a live situation.”
Rousey’s career initially ended after she suffered back-to-back knockout losses to Holm and Amanda Nunes. It wasn’t until years later when she was preparing to release an autobiography that Rousey claimed repeated head injuries caused her to suffer those knockout losses and eventually leave the sport before further damage was done.
Rousey later stated UFC CEO Dana White got her in contact with new doctors who discovered her head injuries weren’t caused by repeated concussions and instead gave her medicine to cure the symptoms that effectively ended her fighting career. Regardless, Rousey emphatically stated her priorities have changed, which is why she was willing to come back to face Carano but wasn’t sticking around to face anybody else—Holm included.
“I was just talking yesterday how I feel like an alchemist where a person goes through everything they went through and they return a changed person at the end,” Rousey said. “I feel like how many years ago, 10 years ago or whatever the hell it would be, this would be exactly what I would have wanted. More than anything. A chance at coming back and redemption and beating her and I could feasibly have Amanda Serrano or something after that and have bigger and bigger money fights and all this fame and all this money and right now it’s completely within my grasp.
“I’m better than I’ve ever been. I have better coaches than I’ve ever had. I finally don’t have these neurological issues that I had before. But now that I have it all set in front of me, I’ve changed and the things that I want have changed and suddenly these aren’t the most important things in the world to me anymore. It’s these kids and spending time with them. I think that’s the journey that I had to go through. I had to get to this point where you could have all of those things that you wanted 10 years ago but you’ve grown and you’re a different person now and you don’t want those things anymore.”
Rousey insisted she would produce a much different result in a rematch against Holm, but the fight is never going to happen because she’s not fighting again. She’s putting MMA behind her again and putting her full focus on family.
“I think I definitely have the ability and the opportunity to be able to f*cking clean her clock and rewrite all of that but it’s no longer important to me anymore,” Rousey said. “It doesn’t haunt me. It’s not the most important thing in my life and these people’s perceptions and knowing how great I am and all this stuff.
“I know how good I am and my kids need me in their life and I want to be there for them. This isn’t the most important thing anymore. Of course the time that I get where I could go back and do that, I don’t want to go back. I only want to go forward.”
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