There have been rumours swirling that Ronda Rousey might be about to make a comeback to MMA, and she’s finally addressed them at length. It’s been a bit of a recurring topic ever since she left the sport after losing to Amanda Nunes back in 2016. She has since gone on to explore a number of other ventures, including a fairly successful career as a WWE superstar and releasing a comic boom. No matter where life has taken her, MMA has always been her biggest career and fans have often wondered if she would return seeing as she left it behind when she was just 29.
Now she’s 38 and a return obviously doesn’t seem likely, but a recent increase in training footage has led many fans and journalists to speculate otherwise. She actually spoke about the recent discussions surrounding her potential return and although she didn’t reveal any plans, she didn’t shut the idea down either:
“They’re like ‘you look so good!’ Because I’m the greatest ever. Of course, this is what happens when I train! I look great. Sorry. I don’t have to have a plan for world domination in mind… But Mike Tyson coming back and being the biggest fight of last year just kind of proves that I don’t think anyone’s ever really done.”
She also revealed that although she’s been having training sessions with some legendary grapplers and fighters recently, she hasn’t really been going far out of her way to find them:
“I have a cage in my garage. It’s not like I went anywhere. I really did mosey on out there. It’s really awesome I get to be kind of a spoiled brat now where I’m like ‘I just want to build a cage in my backyard and bring my friends over to do some karate.’ 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.”
She also explained why she has ended up training so much lately and surprisingly, it actually stems from having her most recent child:
“I think after having my last baby, being pregnant is f***ing 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. 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.”
Even if she doesn’t make a comeback, it’s refreshing to hear that Ronda Rousey appears to have fallen back in love with grappling and MMA again. She has been open about the difficulties of being a champion when she was at the peak of her career, and it seems like having that burden taken off her shoulders is a positive:
“It just kind of came from a place of just joy, and I just want to do it just because I enjoy it, instead of this is what I feel obligated to do or this is what I’m being coerced to be doing for one reason or another. It’s what my body really wants. It’s what I’ve been training to do my whole life and I just feel healthier and better and I want to train again.”
Her increased training schedule has attracted attention from people like Dana White, and naturally she’s still had to answer a lot of questions about her goals. She was pretty clear on her overall feelings though:
“It makes me happy. It’s really funny, I’m training and everyone’s like ‘what are you training for? What are you doing?’ I’m like for my own joy. Is that bad?”
The full interview with Ronda Rousey where she spoke about the idea of making a comeback to MMA was uploaded to the official YouTube channel of The Breakfast Club:
