Despite being known as the queen of the armbar during her historic MMA run, Ronda Rousey was never particularly fond of the damage it would do to people. In fact, she was kind of grossed out by it.
Even before making her first appearance inside the Octagon at UFC 157, ‘Rowdy’ was already well-known for snapping limbs in a matter of seconds. Under the Strikeforce banner, it took her less than two minutes to collectively tap out Sarah D’Alelio, Julia Budd, and Sarah Kaufman.
She also submitted Miesha Tate in Strikeforce two years before repeating the performance in a slightly more competitive rematch.
However, in a recently resurfaced interview with MiddleEasy five months before her UFC debut, Rousey revealed that she found nothing satisfying about hurting her opponents with the devastating maneuver.
“I don’t think it’s satisfying,” Rousey said. “It kind of grosses me out. I tell everybody, it kind of feels like tearing apart a turkey with a crotch. It really does. It’s gross. When you’re trying to get a turkey thing off and you feel all the cartilage and the tendons and the bones coming off, when you’re pulling it, it really is that exact feeling.
“It’s gross. But that’s the way it is. They’d try to do the exact same thing to me. I’ve felt it being done to my own arms” (h/t talkSPORT).
Ronda Rousey went 6-0 with six first-round finishes, all by armbar, before being declared the UFC’s first-ever female world champion. But of those six women who fell, Julia Budd undoubtedly suffered the most. Squaring off at Strikeforce Challengers 20 in November 2011, Rousey recalled dislocated Budd’s elbow a mere 39 seconds into the scrap.
“I totally felt it go out. The referee said I couldn’t talk to her. So, I was like, ‘Alright, that’s totally out,’” Rousey said at the time. “I flipped her over and I was like, ‘Ew!’ I didn’t want to take my arm and point at it but I was like, ‘Uh, somebody stop this please.’”
Ronda Rousey despises being called a ‘one-trick pony’
Rousey added two more armbar submission victories to her resume during her first two appearances with the UFC, prompting some fight fans to dub her a one-trick pony.
“When people say that I’m a one-trick pony and only have the one armbar, they don’t realize that I have so many setups to that armbar that I don’t even know them all – I’ll make them up on the fly,” Rousey said in an interview with the UFC following her debut.
“When you’re watching boxing and you see somebody knock someone out with a right hand every time, they’re not like, ‘Oh, they’re a one-trick pony.’ No, they have a billion different setups for that right hand. And just because it ended with a right hand on the face, it doesn’t mean it’s the same thing every time.
“And just because so many people are unfamiliar with grappling and they just see the armbar ending the same, they assume the setup’s the same, but if you look back at all those fights, I’ve jumped into that armbar from many different positions. It ends the same way, but the setups are always different. So they can prepare for a certain setup, but I’m always gonna think of more.”
Ronda Rousey wrapped up her career in 2016, winning the Strikeforce and UFC bantamweight titles and going 12-2 along the way. Every one of her dozen victories came via finish with nine armbars and three TKOs.