Rousey continues to terrify us with details of how many concussions she suffered through during her athletic career, and the effects they had on her fights.
Ronda Rousey’s new autobiography ‘Our Fight’ is set to come out on April 4th, but juicy behind-the-scenes details on her career in the UFC and WWE are already trickling out ahead of release.
One big revelation she shared was that she had already suffered a number of terrible concussions during her Olympic judo days, and that was why she stopped fighting in the UFC after two bad knockout losses. In an interview with Cageside Seats, “Rowdy” described just how bad her symptoms were.
“I had a very rich concussion history before I even started in MMA,” she said. “For my entire judo career, which was like 10 years, I actually was experiencing concussion symptoms more often than not for an entire decade.”
“Every single time you get one concussion, it’s easier to get the next one. And so I’d been compounding concussion after concussion after concussion for so many years that when I got into MMA, if I got any kind of significant strike, I would be seeing stars, which is not normal.”
“It got to the point where if I was getting touched at all, if I was getting jabbed, I was starting to get concussion symptoms and I couldn’t tell my coach about it,” Rousey said. “I couldn’t tell Dana about it. ‘Cause, they would retire me. They wouldn’t let me fight. And I wasn’t ready to let go. I wasn’t ready to admit that I couldn’t do everything perfectly. Cuz that’s what I had to believe to be able to be at that level.”
Two weeks before the fateful Holly Holm fight that marked the beginning of the end of her UFC career, Rousey fell down some stairs and knocked herself out. She walked into that fight suffering from concussion symptoms, and then things went real wrong from the first punch she took.
“The first time I got touched in that fight, it knocked all my bottom teeth loose,” she revealed. “I was completely out on my feet the entire fight. I couldn’t see how far away she was from me, if that makes sense. And not seeing things as quickly. Usually when I fight, time dilates and I see everything in slow motion. This was like I was in like a fog where I couldn’t tell range or anything.”
Holm would knock Rousey out with a nasty headkick one minute in the second round of their fight. It would take Ronda a year to recover and step back into the cage … against Amanda Nunes, who blitzed “Rowdy” with a 45 second KO, ending her days as a UFC fighter.
Rousey would move on to work with the WWE under the thumb of ‘Emperor Palpatine’ Vince McMahon, and the cross-sports star has promised her autobiography features many stories from that era of her career as well.