Ronda Rousey has the ending she always wanted.
It took Rousey less than 30 seconds to secure the win in her comeback fight Saturday at the first-ever MVP MMA event on Netflix as she tackled Gina Carano and immediately forced her to tap out to an armbar. This was Rousey’s first fight since December 2016 and her first win since August 2015.
Rousey, 39, never had proper goodbye after competing in her last MMA fight nearly 10 years ago, and she doesn’t plan to ruin this moment by booking another fight anytime soon.
“There’s no way I could have ended it better than this,” Rousey said in her post-fight interview. “I want to have some more babies and I’ve got to get cooking.”
Travis Browne, Rousey’s husband and the father of their two children, joined Rousey in the cage for an emotional embrace.
Even with Carano suffering a humbling defeat, the mood in the aftermath of their fight was one of celebration, and Rousey is glad she didn’t have to do any real damage to her fellow women’s MMA pioneer.
“I was hoping to come out both as unscathed as possible, because I didn’t really want to hurt her,” Rousey said. “Luckily, it was just beautiful martial arts, that’s what I think that is. That’s what that efficiency is. It’s an art.”
Rousey spent most of her post-fight speech expressing gratitude to friends, family, and coaches, and especially to Carano, a fighter whom she considers to be her idol. This was Carano’s first fight since 2009, and Rousey believes that just as they helped push female fighters to the forefront together, they needed each other to make the historic Netflix headliner happen.
“Gina is the person who brought me into MMA,” Rousey said. “She’s the only person who could have brought me back into MMA. She’s my f*cking hero. You brought me back home when nobody else could. You showed me where my home was when nobody else could.
“You changed my world and we changed the world and I will never, ever forget, and I will never be able to pay you back enough. I’m so glad we finally got to share this moment.”
Adding another wrinkle to Rousey’s comeback win, at the evening’s post-fight press conference, MVP CFO Nakisa Bidarian mentioned that Rousey entered Saturday’s contest with an injury, confirming the buzz swirling around Rousey’s official weigh-in on Friday when it looked like she was moving with a slight limp.
Rousey addressed the injury later during her own session with reporters.
“I sprained my ankle or foot pretty bad, like two and a half weeks ago,” Rousey said. “But it just made me think of when my first injury as a kid I broke my big toe in judo and my mom made me run laps around the mat for the rest of the night and she said, ‘You don’t know if you’re going to get hurt on the most important day. You could get hurt the day of the Olympics, you could get hurt when it really matters, and you need to know that your body listens to you, not the other way around.‘
“Man, I was like, ‘Thanks for the trauma, mama!’ Right when it happened, we had two and a half weeks left and I’m like, ‘Welp, looks like I’m doing this with my ankle messed up.’ But I basically have never had a fight where I wasn’t injured in some way. I didn’t ever pull out of a fight because I’ve never been injured, I never pulled out of a fight because I always fight anyway. So that’s just part of it and when it happened, I’m like, this is part of it and I’m the f*cking best at this. I pushed through. But yeah, I was definitely trying real hard not to look hurt at the open workout. I was trying not to look like I was holding myself back and I really re-aggravated it again and I had to dig deep this week and I was trying so hard not to limp. At the weigh-ins, it’s usually worst in the morning, and I was trying so hard not to visibly limp in front of people. But hey, I slipped it in there, I got it done anyway and no one was really the wiser. That’s just part of performing at the highest level. You have to push through.”
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