LOS ANGELES — In case the point hasn’t quite sunk in yet, Ronda Rousey was not happy with how she and her team was portrayed on the 18th season of The Ultimate Fighter.
“The experience sucked,” Rousey said Thursday. “It wasn’t the perception. Yeah, they needed a villain and they made me fit the role and that’s fine. I wasn’t purposely going out of my way on the set to make these things happen. In hindsight it was a s— experience and it came out terrible for me.”
While the UFC women’s bantamweight champion has made it clear she wasn’t a fan of the show, she had not gone much into specifics. Until Thursday, that is, at a luncheon with reporters at the JW Marriot hotel in downtown Los Angeles.
“We were really mistreated and disrespected by the whole production staff,” Rousey said. “And everybody was going out of their way to get the most dramatic response possible.”
As an example, Rousey claims that her coaching staff, led by Edmund Tarverdyan, weren’t paid for the first half of the taping, then were told they were going to have go through background checks.
“In the middle of the show, they had already been there for three weeks,” Rousey said. “They hadn’t even paid my coaches, then suddenly they came up to us and said we need to go through background checks. In the middle of the show. They were like this is normal procedure. It’s normal procedure for you to not pay people do to the show? And then you do background checks after three weeks? What the f— is going on? F— the background checks, we’re not doing it.”
Then there was the infamous confrontation with veteran Dennis Hallman, a guest Team Tate coach, in which it was portrayed as if Rousey stepped between Hallman and Taverdyan to prevent a fight. That’s not how it went down, according to Rousey.
“They brought him in to f— with Edmund so they could kick him off the show and we’d have no head coach,” Rousey said. “So they don’t show the part where Hallman starts with Edmund in the parking lot. They don’t show that. They only show the reaction where I shoved Edmund and told him you’re not going to do this, you’re not going to get in trouble. And I told Hallman, you really want to do this? You really want to fight? Give us your number, we’ll go meet somewhere in the desert. No cameras around. Nope, he didn’t give his number.”
Rousey wasn’t done with her take on Team Tate’s portrayal. “They’re like ‘we fear for our safety, they’re going to hurt us,'” she said. “They’re like these little b— kids in the classroom making nicey-nicey with the teacher, and then instigating with the other kids as soon as they turn around. They’re being b— when the camera was off, then she was like, ‘we’re such victims’ when the cameras were on.”
Believe it or not, despite the badwill, Rousey says she doesn’t regret doing the show for one specific reason: Because it helped raise the profile of women’s MMA.
“If you think The Ultimate Fighter was the best opportunity for me at the time, you’re wrong,” Rousey said. “It needed to be done for those girls and it needed to be done for the division and they benefited from it.”
Even then, though, she couldn’t resist another dig at Tate.
“For Miesha it was the best opportunity at the time,” Rousey said. “It was really important for her to come off well because that was her moment to do so. So I’m like, look, I need to make sure that everyone sees this, I don’t need to come across like everybody loves me, so sure, it doesn’t matter to me, I can roll with this one, but I needed these girls to do well. … These kids are my kids for the long run and I would be absolutely shocked if Miesha even knew where her kids are today.”
Next year will feature the first all-women’s TUF cast, as strawweight women will be featured. Rousey says Liz Carmouche would be an ideal coaching candidate, and that 115 pounds is the right weight class for the show.
“Liz Carmouche is a really cool chick and she says she wants to do it, so I totally support her doing if that’s what she wants,” Rousey said. “The 115-pound girls, man, they’re badasses, there are bound to be some problems as they go along. … It’s really encouraging that they’re adding them, it shows that what we’ve done has made a difference.”
Just don’t expect Rousey to help out. Or to watch TUF 18 any time soon.
“It sucked when I was on the set,” Rousey said. “Why would I want to see an even s—-ier version of it?”