Ronda Rousey, sporting a badly discolored leg from Muay Thai training and some facial bruises covered up by makeup, talked sex before fights and Georges St-Pierre’s comments on women fighting during the second episode of Jim Rome’s new Showtime talk show Wednesday night.
Rousey was the subject of a segment involving 10 questions and made it clear she was in fight training, but provided no hints as to when, where or who she would face in her inevitable UFC debut.
Rousey has in the past spoken about how she thinks sex before fights is great for women, thinking it raises their testosterone level, although maybe not the actual day of the fight.
“For girls, it raises your testosterone, so I try to have as much sex as possible before I fight actually,” said the 25-year-old who appeared on the cover of this year’s ESPN Body Magazine. “Not with everybody. I don’t put out like a Craigslist ad or anything, but if I got a steady, I’m going to be like, `Yo, fight time’s coming up.”‘
The UFC’s women’s bantamweight champion did seem annoyed when Rome brought up comments by Georges St-Pierre, who said that he wasn’t a fan of women’s mixed martial arts and didn’t enjoy watching women punch each other in the face. Rousey seemed mad someone in her own sport would say that, comparing that attitude with the generation of boxing fans who looked down on MMA because it was different.
“Initially, the way he said it, it reminds me a lot like when you listen to boxing fans that are like, ‘Oh, the MMA fighters, they’re good athletes, and they’re talented and good for them, but I can’t stand to see guys humping on the ground like that. It’s not a real man’s sport. Good for them, that they make money,’ they’re kind of prejudiced against it,” she said. “(He) seems to have very much that same kind of prejudice toward women in MMA, and he said it as tactfully as possible. That doesn’t make it a tactful thing to say.”
In fairness to St-Pierre, everyone does have the right to enjoy or not enjoy sports or aspects of sports. If he had said he didn’t believe women belong fighting in MMA, that would be a very different issue.
She then told a story about her wildest fight, this one before she ever got into MMA, with two guys in a movie theater, which ended up getting her sued. She joked that they picked the fight, and then when they lost, they filed a suit. But since there were enough witnesses to what happened, she won in court as well.
“Yes, I got into a fight with a couple of guys at the end of 2007, before the Olympics, in a movie theater,” she said. “It was four couples, so four guys and four girls. One girl tried to get into it. And I had two friends with me, who held off two of the guys, so I was only really handling two guys by myself. They sued me for assault because it didn’t really go too well for them. I guess if you lose a fight in Santa Monica, the next option is to sue. Everyone in the theater was cheering for me. I was thinking I might have a future in this.”