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Brett Okamoto
Multiple Authors
RIVERSIDE, Calif. — There’s a small tree in Ronda Rousey‘s backyard filled with caterpillars that her 4-year-old daughter regularly checks when she gets home from school. There’s a fenced-in duck pond for poultry, three compost heaps and a cow in the pasture named Myrtle. There’s a quiet dog, Poncho, who doesn’t initially accept petting from strangers — but will eventually sneak up and lick their unsuspecting fingers if they stay long enough.
The inside of Rousey’s home looks like the familiar mess of any home with small children. Sheets of paper with her daughter’s earliest attempts to write her own name in marker. Dinosaur popup books. There’s a silly painting next to the mirror in the bathroom, depicting Rousey and her husband, Travis Browne, in leafy garments in the Garden of Eden, smiling.
What there is not is a single shred of evidence of the cultural and sports icon Rousey once was. As if none of it ever happened.
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when the story of Ronda Rousey and mixed martial arts ended. The obvious answer is Dec. 30, 2016, when Amanda Nunes quickly demolished her at UFC 207 in what became her final UFC appearance. But maybe it was before that. Maybe it was at Los Angeles International Airport in November 2015, when she covered her face with a pillow to avoid being seen after Holly Holm dealt her the first loss of her fighting career. Or earlier still — when fight preparations with her coach became so toxic, Rousey’s mother refused to attend her fight against Holm out of protest.
“I’m not sure there was an end,” Rousey told ESPN last month, from the back porch of her home. “It was all f—ed up. It was like one of those popup books over there, refusing to close.”
Whatever that conclusion was to Rousey and the fight game, it sucked. It was a bitter divorce. Rousey built, in her words, “a lot of walls” around her heart, and when she did, a mutual resentment settled in. Fans didn’t understand why she seemed so angry. Rousey didn’t understand what they failed to understand. She believed she had been who the sport needed her to be, given up pieces of herself and the fans didn’t appreciate it. They said she just couldn’t handle defeat.
The relationship just sort of died. Somewhat tragically, in the eyes of some.
“You’re an Olympic medalist in judo and the icon of women’s MMA, and you don’t want to talk about it?” Rousey’s close friend Ricky Lundell remembered wondering. “And if you do talk about it, it’s immediately, ‘I hated that time. I hated what was going on.’
“When you’re around that as a friend, it makes you say, ‘Wow, there’s a lot of healing that needs to take place here.’ But she had closed it off.”
For a long time, it looked as if it would stay that way. Rousey had no desire to tear down the walls between her heart and martial arts. She and Browne, a retired UFC heavyweight, have long wished to move to their own private “oasis” in Hawaii, where Browne was born. Rousey, who has given birth to two daughters and is stepmother to two sons, wants to have more children. The notion of fighting — and even the memories of doing so — were behind her.
“I was completely done, done-skis,” Rousey said.
But over the past two years, the universe aligned in unexpected ways to bring Rousey and MMA back together. She will face Gina Carano, the original pioneer of women’s MMA, on May 16 in the Intuit Dome Inglewood, California, in the main event of the first MMA card to air on Netflix. The event includes other big names such as Nate Diaz and Francis Ngannou, and is the first MMA card for Jake Paul’s Most Valuable Promotions, but it is undeniably Rousey’s event. She is its origin, the one who initiated and fought for it to happen.
The word “comeback” has inevitably surfaced about the 39-year-old Rousey’s return to competition, but that is not what this is. This is about closure, for a story that never had any.
“This is a chance for me to rewrite my ending,” she said.
WHEN ROUSEY RETURNED to her locker room after defeating Sara McMann at UFC 170 in Las Vegas, she immediately laid down and turned off the lights.
A furious 66 seconds in the Octagon had just ended, in which McMann crumpled to the canvas from a Rousey knee to the liver. Before being stopped, McMann was credited with a mere 14 total strikes. It was essentially a flawless performance by Rousey, but she was still disoriented.
“I was getting concussion symptoms, splotches in my vision,” Rousey said. “I barely got touched that fight. That was the moment where I started to feel like, ‘F—, nobody can touch me. I need to finish fights before I even get touched.”
Unbeknownst to anyone else, Rousey had dealt with these concussion-like symptoms throughout her transition to MMA. She would lose fields of vision and struggle to track movement. It was getting worse over time. She had a history of head trauma that dated to her judo career and assumed she was merely paying the inevitable costs of that. She was afraid to see a doctor because she already knew what one would say — that she had irreparable brain damage and shouldn’t be fighting anymore.
“I thought I was on the road to CTE and honestly didn’t want to know,” Rousey said. “I was kind of in denial about it for a long time, and it finally caught up with me. It was one reason I never talked about my losses, because I didn’t know what was going on. I thought I couldn’t fight anymore, and if I couldn’t fight, I didn’t want to think about it anymore.”
Rousey’s growing fears about her ability to compete and long-term health coincided with a breakdown of her training environment. The close relationship she had forged with head coach Edmond Tarverdyan had started to fray, even during the peak of her success. She says her camps were devoid of any joy and even turned psychologically demanding. Her mother, AnnMaria De Mars, expressed her disgruntlement toward Tarverdyan publicly, but Rousey stuck with him.
“I was emotionally babysitting my coach,” Rousey said. “Just constantly like, ‘Oh my God, don’t put him in a bad mood. Keep him in a good mood.’ He had this passive-aggressive way of like, ‘I’m going to make training miserable if you don’t make me happy.’ I’d had dysfunctional coach relationships since I was a kid, I thought it was normal.”
Tarverdyan could not be reached for comment at the time of publishing.
As her relationship with her team was in a valley, Rousey’s fame was reaching its peak.
ESPN named Rousey the 23rd-most famous athlete, and second-most famous women’s athlete, in the world in 2015. During the buildup to her August 2015 knockout of Bethe Correia at UFC 190, Rousey coined the term “do nothing bitch” on the “UFC Embedded” YouTube series to describe someone she never wished to be. The speech went viral, and Beyoncé used it during a festival appearance the following month. Her popularity was at an all-time high, but between the health concerns and fractures in camp, things were starting to crack behind the scenes.
Perhaps to overcompensate, Rousey turned up her act. She had never shied away from prefight confrontations but acted oddly aggressive with Holm ahead of UFC 193 in Australia, running up on Holm during an infamous stare-down at the ceremonial weigh-in. Looking back, she was putting on a show.
“I think it’s impossible for fans to know anybody they don’t personally know, it’s a futile exercise,” Rousey said. “So, in the position I was in, you’re really just putting up a front. I think I leaned too hard into that and created an overexaggerated version of myself.”
When things did break down, there was a full collapse. The loss to Holm was devastating, and an ensuing year of virtual silence by Rousey alienated her from the rest of the sport. When she returned to face Nunes in December 2016, she was barely there. The fight was over in 48 seconds.
ROUSEY’S MMA RECONCILIATION didn’t begin until early 2025 — and only then because of her friend, Lundell.
Lundell is a master in the grappling world, having instructed everyone from UFC athletes to amateur wrestlers to Navy SEALs.
“I really did feel it was a travesty,” said Lundell, of Rousey’s despondency toward MMA. “It was something she loved so much and done since childhood. To have the impact on the game that she’d had — to be loved one day, hated the next — that’s a lot for a person to take on.
“A few years ago, I was heavily in prayer, and I was told I should go ask Ronda to help me work on my black belt in judo.”
Rousey, who was pregnant with her second daughter at the time, agreed. She and Lundell started training judo once a week, usually in Rousey’s garage. And in that setting, where there was no expectation or pressure, she found her love for martial arts again.
At one point, Browne walked into the garage to see his pregnant wife enthusiastically demonstrating a “death row” into a “crash pad” to Lundell and had to shut it down.
“He was like, ‘Babe, you have to stop, no more suplexing people while you’re pregnant,'” Rousey said. “But it was this little thing that chipped away at the wall I’d put up.”
Later that year, Mike Tyson boxed Jake Paul at AT&T Stadium on Netflix. Rousey initially found the whole event “stupid” and didn’t watch, but she was shocked by how massive it became. Netflix announced 108 million people watched Paul defeat a 58-year-old Tyson, and the numbers struck a chord.
“People missed what Mike Tyson brought to the table,” Rousey said. “They missed that feeling that he gave them, and it didn’t matter that he was almost 60. If he could do it, why couldn’t I? And I’m a lot younger than 60.”
Around the same time, Rousey saw an interview on television that featured Carano, the woman who once inspired her to begin MMA. Rousey’s life lacked direction following the 2008 Olympic Games until she saw Carano competing in MMA. Now, all these years later, she felt Carano looked unhealthy and unhappy, things she had felt at the end of her UFC career. During that difficult time, Rousey had the WWE to lean into, where she found something to do during two stints in 2018 and 2022. Maybe Carano needed something similar.
It struck her then that they needed to fight. Rousey believed Carano looked like someone who could use purpose. And Rousey needed a different ending. Maybe she had always needed it, and this was the first opportunity at it. That book that had refused to close correctly in 2016, this could finally be a way to close it.
As she began to pursue her ending, she realized that she needed to understand the concussion symptoms she had avoided. At the urging of UFC CEO Dana White, Rousey visited the Cleveland Clinic Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, where she was formally diagnosed with migraine with aura and cortical spreading depression (CSD). Migraine with aura can cause vision symptoms such as flashing lights and blind spots as well as pounding headaches, dizziness and other intense migraine symptoms. CSD is a rarer condition that can manifest in aura-like symptoms when triggered by traumatic brain injury.
According to Dr. John Neidecker of the Association of Ringside Physicians, CSD symptoms can linger for weeks and months after a traumatic brain injury and can be especially severe in people with a history of migraines. Dr. Charles Bernick at the Cleveland Clinic assured Rousey that the majority of her symptoms stemmed from migraines and he did not detect permanent damage to her brain. And, he said, the diagnosis is treatable with medication. Not only did she learn she’d be medically cleared to fight, but it would also actually be safer for her to return than she had thought previously.
“The more I thought about it, I was like, ‘Damn, I really f—ing need this,'” Rousey said. “It was the first time I felt excited about it again.”
THERE’S A SMALL TOWN somewhere in rural Hawaii, where Rousey and Browne got married in August 2017, eight months after her final UFC fight. Rousey has never divulged its name.
Although she was less in the public eye by then, she remembers paparazzi descending on the island that week, trying to capture photographs of her wedding.
“They were offering $50,000 for information and got completely iced out,” Rousey said. “Everybody was like, ‘Get the hell out of here.’ The community protected me. Ever since, I was like, ‘Oh my God, this is where I need to raise my kids.”
They already own land in the area, and plan to move as soon as this fight is over. Perhaps they’ll disappear, although Rousey is now tempted by the thought of becoming a promoter.
The fact that her final appearance will take place on MVP with Netflix — and not the UFC and White — was not by initial design. Rousey wanted to have her final fight with White, but said the UFC wasn’t willing to pay what she considered fair compensation. She wants to break the record $5 million purse that boxer Amanda Serrano set for women’s combat sports last year and says it wouldn’t have happened in the UFC.
Rousey has accused the UFC’s corporate structure, specifically chief financial officer Hunter Campbell, for serving shareholders over the good of the sport. She does not blame White, whom she still considers a friend and believes was overruled when it came to the UFC’s decision to pass on her fight with Carano. The UFC declined to be interviewed for this story.
Rousey believes she’s in a unique position, especially with Netflix as an ally, to elicit some type of change in the UFC. Even if she only catches the company’s attention, that alone could go a long way with any MMA fans who agree with her message that the UFC has started to turn into a soulless version of its old self.
“Some of the people over there pissed off the wrong woman,” Browne laughed. “The thing about it is that she’s not wrong. I think it’s great and lifts the whole sport, when you have one of the greatest prizefighters of the UFC now promoting against them.”
Perhaps that’s a fight Rousey will accept beyond this weekend. It appears to be the only fight left, as she’s repeatedly said she wouldn’t have returned at all were it not for her respect for Carano. Her admiration for Carano is so great, in fact, Rousey doesn’t fear the potential sting of a loss that might have devastated her in the past.
“If there is any person in the world that I would want to steal my joy and walk around with it, it would be Gina,” she said.
Win or lose, this is the end for Rousey as a fighter. It is not the end for Rousey and MMA. Even if she doesn’t pursue the promoter route, she’s thinking about opening a kids’ academy in Hawaii someday. The idea of living on the mats, experiencing and sharing her joy of martial arts with others, is very appealing to her again.
In that sense, there still won’t be an end to Rousey’s MMA story because there will never be an end to her relationship with it. And that is a far better conclusion than the one she’s had.
