Will Ronda Rousey Fight Again Rousey Nunes
This story on Ronda Rousey was originally published on Dec. 15, 2016. Rousey will be featured during a Women'southward History Month presentation on ESPN2 on Sunday at viii a.one thousand.
The motel is almost 2 hours outside of Los Angeles. Directions come in the form of a screenshot -- cell service is spotty up here, so information technology's best to have a backup.
Ronda Rousey'due south all bundled up when she answers the front door. She knows what this looks like. She's broken, right? She's been hiding out in a basement since her stunning loss to Holly Holm last November. Shattered in a million pieces. Listening to Adele and hissing in the dark. She smiles. It's fun to feed it sometimes.
"It's like I'1000 doing the chick version of growing a beard and living in a cave, you know?" Rousey says. "You remember when Batman goes off to this ninja identify, and so time lapses and you see he's grown this beard? My adult female version of growing a beard was letting my highlights grow out and changing my number."
But this isn't some remote motel at the end of a winding dirt road. This is a pocket-sized mount customs. Her neighbors know who she is and what she is doing, simply they don't carp her here.
On this crisp November morn, Rousey wears a hoodie and Ugg boots for the curt walk from the motel to the detached garage her longtime trainer Edmond Tarverdyan has turned into a dojo. Half-dozen days a week, twice a day, Rousey makes this trip to train for her comeback fight against Amanda Nunes on Dec. 30.
Sometimes, equally she walks over, she'll stop at a small chicken coop.
"The chickens don't demand me to entertain them," she says.
It'due south a joke. Sort of. Because damn, she actually spent way too much energy trying to put on a bear witness last time.
Back then, when she was undefeated, she'd spend hours and hours thinking of all the things she was expected to practise to exist successful: Sell the fight, build the women's division of the UFC, have photos with fans, pose on the ruby-red carpet. Tweet, Facebook, Instagram. Entertain. She'd stew and swirl all night until an warning clock would audio way as well early.
Now she just wakes up whenever the sunday bursts into the back bedroom of the cabin.
"That loss saved me from becoming what I detest," she says. "One of those people who live their lives to print everyone else. Who put up a front for the world to adore. Who make sure every charitable human action is posted and shared for their own image gain. Who posture and pose for people they care nothing about except for the opinion they take of them."
This year, this space she'southward created for herself is for one purpose.
"I'yard just getting my life back," she says.
The isolation provided by her remote cabin with its garage-turned-dojo has been good for Rousey. Eric Williams for ESPN
She e'er used to spend a few weeks up in the mountains during training campsite. That was the plan last year before the Holm fight, as she and Tarverdyan scheduled out her typical two-month fight-prep routine.
But then the Jan 2016 fight was moved up to Nov 2015 after UFC 193 headliner Robbie Lawler injured his thumb. UFC president Dana White needed someone with enough star ability to supplant him for what became the largest crowd in omnipresence at a UFC fight in history, at the 55,000-seat Etihad Stadium in Melbourne, Australia.
The change in schedule meant Rousey and Tarverdyan had just 44 days for military camp. It meant no cabin. But Rousey all the same said yes because maxim no felt similar albeit she couldn't do it.
"Ronda was basically like, 'What practise y'all need? I got it,' " White says. "'And if anybody else turns something else downwardly, I'll practice what they were supposed to do too.' "
"I was just trying to make too many people happy," Rousey says. "But when I try and exercise favors and brand everybody else happy, at the end of the day, they walk abroad happy and I'm the 1 who has to bargain with the depression. All the pay-per-views in the world, all the money in the world, it ways f---ing nothing to me because I lost."
She'southward had a twelvemonth to remember almost all the things that went wrong in that loss. She remembers how weak and dehydrated her trunk felt from an excruciating weight cutting. Subsequently, Tarverdyan had doctors analyze her body chemistry with blood and pilus samples. Her cortisol levels were off the charts. Simply all those are symptoms of a simple truth that looks so obvious in retrospect.
She just should've said, "No."
Rousey withal cries sometimes equally she relives details from the fight. Information technology's painful and embarrassing. But she is the i who kept saying yep to everything. She left herself vulnerable going into the fight, and Holm made her pay. Rousey's got to own that.
Information technology'south easy to fall back downward that shame spiral, but that's not productive anymore. Now she has to train and experience strong again. To remember why she fights. That was the signal of coming upward to this motel. Having a physical purlieus is essential for someone who has problem setting any limits on herself. It'southward a way of compartmentalizing.
The other nighttime, for instance, she painted a scene of pino trees on meridian of a snowy mountain. The trees in the center of the mountain bandage a long shadow. Possibly twice as long every bit the acme of the copse themselves. It could exist seen as an artistic expression of the weight she's been carrying effectually all year. Long shadows, fallen trees, distorted perspective.
"Nope," she says. "Information technology's paint by numbers. I'm going to paint more trees on the side of the mount. It won't expect that way when I'm washed."
Rousey fighting on her own terms
Ramona Shelburne describes how Ronda Rousey is approaching her first fight in over a year, a knockout loss to Holly Holm, and how it differs from what she'due south washed in the past.Eric Williams
It's cold in the dojo when she enters. Rousey stretches while a space heater warms the room.
"Continue the door airtight," she says as Tarverdyan walks in. "Don't allow the heat get out."
Rousey slides her legs up and back on a foam roller, breaking up the stiffness in her hamstrings and quadriceps. And then she grabs a long wooden staff and twirls and twists information technology through a series of poses that look like an action sequence in a Bruce Lee movie.
This summertime she had surgery to get her knee into better shape. She can throw kicks and put weight on her leg when she steps back on it at present.
But it's better. Not stock-still. "My ACL is gone. My cartilage is gone," she says. "It's been gone. I don't even know when it left."
A twelvemonth agone, it would have been shocking to hear her talk this way. Only she's washed pretending like things are fine when they're clearly not.
Tarverdyan comes over to start wrapping her hands. He's done this hundreds of times over the past few years. Each piece of tape and gauze has a message written on it, and after the workout, she'll crumple information technology into a brawl. If they were back at her home gym in LA, she'd toss the ball over the wall of the Octagon cage. A little game to break upwards the monotony of training camp.
There are hundreds of balls of tape and hand wraps from over the years. Many say, "Retire Undefeated." During this training campsite, she's writing a new slogan on her used wraps: "FTA." F--- Them All.
That includes rivals who try to get press for themselves past cartoon her into faux fights on social media. Everyone who cheered that she lost. "Fans" who promise they won't tag her location in photos merely violate the trust as soon as she'south out of sight. "I'm being geotagged like a rhino," she says.
Simply her mom, a one-time judoka herself, keeps reminding her that her motivation has got to be more "FTA."
"F -- everybody is not a good reason to fight," her female parent, AnnMaria De Mars, told her. "I think that's stupid and bulls -- ."
De Mars has never been afraid to challenge her daughter. This fourth dimension, her message to Ronda was simple: "You need something to fight for."
Tarverdyan shuffles through the box of prints he'southward brought to hang on the blank walls hither. The photos get back to the starting time of their relationship. Back when Rousey drove a beat-up gilded Honda Accord with a broken window, sweat-stained seats and packets of green Tabasco sauce that she'd stash from fast nutrient restaurants to add to whatever cheap, bland food she had at habitation. She basically lived in that car for a while, driving all over LA to seedy bartending gigs she'd discover on Craigslist, giving judo lessons for $50 an hour, signing up for Pilates classes at different studios ("because the first class is always gratuitous") and praying she wouldn't have to choose between ownership dog food or paying a parking ticket.
"Broke daughter hustle was real," Rousey jokes.
There'south a comfort in going back to those memories now, reminiscing between grooming sessions or late at night while she eats the skewers of meat that Tarverdyan grills over an open flame. Rousey's first UFC fight was less than iv years agone, and dorsum and then, she got in the cage to survive. Rousey herself had pushed White to add together a women's segmentation to UFC, and then if her first fight confronting Liz Carmouche didn't sell, in that location wouldn't be a 2d i. For her, or anyone else.
Tarverdyan comes across a picture of her win over Alexis Davis in July 2014. "Oh my god, that was the moment my knuckle exploded," Rousey says of the injury that needed nine stitches subsequently. "The just reason I don't have pictures of it is I was hiding it from my mom."
Next he finds a picture of her doing an armbar on Sarah Kaufman in 2012, before she fifty-fifty joined UFC. It was shortly after that Kaufman fight that she met her jiujitsu coach, Jason Manly. Manly hadn't seen Rousey much the past few years, but he recently joined her camp, and it didn't take long for them to fall into a rhythm.
"She's probably armbarred me 200 times, and no two of them have been the same," Manly says as they begin today's session. "You can't set for it because her transitions are always different."
Rousey smiles. "Information technology's too because he doesn't fall for the aforementioned due south--- twice. He forces me to exist artistic."
They speak in their ain language during grooming, geeking out over footwork and caput positioning like a songwriter would obsess over chords and lyrics. Manly backs her into a corner; Rousey escapes. She'due south quicker than he remembers. Lighter as well. She'southward been virtually 140-145 pounds during this camp, nearly 10 pounds under where she was during military camp before the Holm fight.
Manly encourages her to throw him; Rousey crouches and uses her leverage to toss him over her hips, fifty-fifty though he outweighs her past a good thirty pounds. At one signal the talking stops and the fighting becomes real, bodies become weapons, guided by instinct and mindfulness.
Rousey is working on fighting against the side of the cage, then she pins him in a manner that renders his size and strength moot. Eventually he escapes, but she accidentally clips his mouth with her elbow during the struggle.
"Oh s---, sorry," she says. "Distressing, lamentable, distressing. Are you OK?"
Manly grabs his jaw. He definitely felt that. "Information technology's OK. That'due south what I'm here for."
He goes to get a mouthguard out of his bag. "Then you'll feel better about it," he says with a grin.
After about an hour, they're both spent. Manly is drenched in sweat. Rousey is stretching again, this time to cool downwards.
"How do you feel?" he asks her.
"Like a ninja," she says.
Rousey dreams of a house in Idaho or Alaska, full of kids, and a job at an fauna sanctuary. Eric Williams for ESPN
Rousey stays and does Pilates for a while before the sweat dries and she gets a chill. This is i of her rituals. Later on the loss to Holm, Pilates was the first exercise she had the middle for.
"Only me out in the garage, lonely and crying, doing Pilates," she jokes. "Good times."
One twenty-four hour period her amanuensis, Brad Slater, went over to her house and sat with her, in the dark, and told her Saturday Night Live wanted her to host. "She was nevertheless in sweatpants," Slater says. "But she looked upward, looked correct at me and said, 'I'chiliad down.' "
SNL gave her a goal to focus on and reminded her she didn't need to fight again to accept opportunities outside of the muzzle. Hollywood had already come up calling, offer a Road House remake -- which, despite reports to the contrary, Rousey says, is "not going anywhere," but awaiting a rewrite -- and a cardinal role in a Peter Berg film called Mile 22. She had options.
And and then Rousey faced a question: If she didn't need to fight once again, why bother?
She doesn't need the coin. Her tastes were never improvident anyway. A fun night for her is staying in with her boyfriend, Travis Browne, and playing World of Warcraft or scrolling through the "Today I Learned" page on Reddit.
"If money is the motivation, then f--- that," she says. "All these Money people... Money [Floyd] Mayweather, Money [Conor] McGregor. I see they're trying to do an angle or whatever. People buy information technology.
The worship of coin in our society is then deep. Just just considering that's the easiest way to go on people's attending or entertain them doesn't mean that'due south the right manner."
Of course, Rousey is still doing things that make her coin. She'southward fighting again, for one. Early in grooming camp, she took a day off to do a photograph shoot for Pantene, which launched a campaign around her called "Potent Is Beautiful." The other day she decided to sell #FearTheReturn shirts to fans who wanted to support her, with role of the gain benefiting an animal rescue organization and a women'due south shelter.
But she does these things because she wants to.
"I want to be able to walk abroad with my head held high. I don't want 'skillful plenty' to be my legacy."
- Ronda Rousey
"I've had no money earlier, and it wasn't the stop of the globe," she says. The time to come she dreams of doesn't require much, either: a house in Idaho or Alaska, full of kids, opening an creature sanctuary. "All I need is me and Travis and our little house in the woods, popping out babies and making snowmen and I'm cool, human. Really, I'm good."
Certain. Maybe.
But life wouldn't be all that bully carrying her what-ifs up to Idaho or Alaska. And the baddest woman on the planet stepping away subsequently one loss? That was never going to happen.
"A fighter does not have that quit in them," Tarverdyan says. "That word means you gotta fight through everything."
The truth is, she was embarrassed by the loss, ashamed of it. She knew what people were saying -- Miesha Tate calling her "a cleaved woman" and wondering "if she'll ever come back the same." Holly Holm'south father, Roger Holm, said she was "scared to death." Cris "Cyborg" Justino started mercilessly calling her out on Twitter.
Rousey refuses to give oxygen to any of their taunts. But even subsequently the voices died down and the world moved on, they became a manifestation of her ain shame. The detest she hears and feels is really just her wounded pride echoing in her head.
So why risk some other embarrassing loss?
"I want to be able to walk away with my head held high," Rousey says. "It's similar a painter looking at what he made and knowing it'south not washed yet. Yous could go away with it. You lot could sell that painting and it would sell. But you'll always know it was never as good as it could have been. I don't desire 'Practiced plenty' to exist my legacy."
In early on November, she taped an episode of Ellen, her first very public appearance in a few months.
Information technology's not as if she hadn't been out in public -- she'd taken a road trip with her friends in September and a trip to Hawaii with Browne in the spring. But those trips were for her. This was stepping back onto the stage and putting herself out there again.
Information technology'southward a conscious choice to step in front of the camera. To some extent, celebrities are complicit in their public caricatures. Rousey is merely trying to practise information technology on her terms now. Exert some mensurate of command so she doesn't get swept up in the current over again.
"It's for a purpose," she says. " [But] I get anxiety afterwards doing stuff like that, fifty-fifty with someone equally sugariness as Ellen."
Equally she tells the story, she notices the water in the small pot she'south using to cook rice boiling over. "Are you supposed to add this much h2o?" she asks Tarverdyan. He's indifferent. Either she'll get it right this time or they'll throw the rice out. Once more.
She grabs a cup and adds more water. Information technology already looks similar mush. She shrugs.
"I become a little nervous. Non like before a fight or annihilation," she says. "I was more nervous that my heels were manner too big and I didn't want to wait like I was dragging my feet when I was walking. Then I was nervous that my nipples were showing through my clothes. [But] information technology's for a purpose. Overall I think it adds to my life."
That's the mantra now.
"Hone in on happiness again," she says. That'south the reason that, outside of SNL, one of her simply appearances this year came on an episode of Drunk History. "Information technology'due south my favorite show. I was similar, 'This year I just need to bask my life.' "
Dana White wanted that too. Rousey is one of his best friends, in or exterior the UFC. But White likewise has a business to run with precedents to consider.
In April 2015, the sport fabricated headlines when some other of its stars, McGregor, refused to attend a news conference. White responded by pulling him from the UFC 200 card.
Rousey watched it unfold from afar. When she saw McGregor a calendar month later, at a Bud Light commercial taping in Las Vegas, she pulled him aside and offered some advice. "Instead of trying to handle everything at once, while information technology's coming at you, merely trying to reach an understanding beforehand," she told him.
Rousey did the same when she negotiated her terms for UFC 207. She would limit her publicity to a few high-profile interviews with people of her choosing, a day of filming at the gym in Glendale and a staredown with Nunes at UFC 205, a bout that McGregor would headline in New York in November.
Originally, White had wanted Rousey to fight at that issue. It was a landmark moment for the sport. New York City! Madison Square Garden! White had been trying to become fights approved there for years. Information technology was the kind of carte du jour that demanded a bold-faced headliner.
When White asked, Rousey and Tarverdyan had to consider the request. It was the kind of affair that, earlier her loss, she never would take passed upward. A huge fight ... the company needing her ... White calling her personally. But in the finish, Rousey declined, proverb she needed more fourth dimension to make sure she was fully recovered from knee surgery.
"Everybody knows how I feel well-nigh Ronda," White says. "She worked harder than anybody for years, and she needed a break. Now that she's coming back, I'grand kind of letting her do it on her terms."
Now all that matters to Rousey is doing what gives her the best risk of winning her next fight. And then she told White no, and instead McGregor defeated Eddie Alvarez to claim his lightweight championship.
"Conor gave me the chance to residue, he took the weight off my shoulders, and I'm grateful," she says.
"I will never put my body at take chances for coin and views always once more. What makes me happy is winning and being the best in the world and that'south it. F--- all the promotion and energy spent on anything that'southward non me winning. And anyone who tries to tell me I owe them free energy on frivolous southward--- during army camp out of 'loyalty' or 'friendship' deserves no loyalty from me and is no friend of mine.
"This is not a time for f---ing favors. This is a time for redemption and revenge."
At nighttime she has to use the flashlight on her iPhone to walk out to the dojo. It'south fifty-fifty colder than the morning, so she warms up faster by shadowboxing.
Tarverdyan comes in to wrap her hands again. Tonight is about technique and quickness. Footwork, head movement, balance. Manly watches as they run through drills. This is not his area of expertise, so he's trying to larn.
The thought is to step effectually a square surface area, throwing a dial with each turn, without ascent from a low, wide opinion.
Manly tries to re-create the movements. It feels totally unnatural.
"Wow, it'due south like I've never been an athlete," he says. "This is hard."
Rousey demonstrates the footwork again. Manly tries to mimic the motion without losing his balance.
"The offset time Ronda did this drill," Tarverdyan tells him, "I wouldn't let her throw more than straight jabs."
Now, though, he's got to allow her throw. He puts on a padded vest and his mitt mitts so Rousey tin can tee off on him for a while. It'southward important for her to hit and get hit once again.
He'south been letting her go further and further all yr. Edifice confidence back later a loss is a particular challenge. Push button too far, too early on, and the recoil is swift. Waiting too long leaves room for doubt to creep in.
The trainer becomes something of a jockey, looking for the correct moment to let the horse run free.
In August he told her to make it the muzzle with one of his male Armenian fighters. "She showed a lot of heart and spirit again," Tarverdyan says. "One time she showed that to me, we were good to go."
Final month, he flew in Olympic boxer Mikaela Mayer for a week of sparring. Only boxing -- no judo or grappling or jiujitsu. It looked exactly like their backgrounds suggested: Mayer stayed outside, trying to sew together points without getting defenseless. Rousey tried to get inside, where she's strongest, and so had to turn off her instinct to have Mayer down to the ground.
Frustrated as she might take been at times, it was expert to exercise patience. Holm exploited her instinct to rush in. Nunes would be foolish not to try to practise the same.
The Vegas oddsmakers mark Rousey equally a slight favorite. No one has been able to defend the belt in the year since Rousey lost it. Holm lost to Miesha Tate, who then lost to Nunes. If Rousey wins the chugalug back, she says she wants another crack at Holm.
To brand things right, or at least endeavour to.
Rousey was adamant near non altering her training schedule after concluding twelvemonth's upset. Eric Williams for ESPN
Every so often, Rousey or her trainers put up a new quote on the forest panels in a higher place the mats in the dojo, next to the pictures Tarverdyan has hung.
Later their training session, Manly takes a few minutes to consider what he wants her to call back.
"I got information technology," he says. "This is perfect."
He grabs the black felt pen and climbs upwards on a step stool: "WHEREVER YOU GO IN LIFE, YOUR Listen HAS BEEN THERE Outset."
Tarverdyan'due south handwriting is understated and neat. In the corner of the room, he'southward written, "A certain darkness is needed to meet the stars."
Rousey'southward quotes are shorter, declarative statements in all caps: "FTA" right by the door. "SUCCESS IS THE All-time REVENGE" in the eye of the room. "FINISH WHAT You STARTED" in some other corner.
"She sent me a text the other day," says Rousey's mother, De Mars. "She said, 'I am doing this to show everybody who believed in me, my little sister, my nieces and my nephew, that in that location's goose egg so swell that you tin can't overcome it. You lot tin can never fall so far that y'all can't ascension up.' "
Now it's time to get back in the cage.
"All I care most is winning this f---ing fight."
Shelburne is a senior writer for ESPN. She spent vii years at the Los Angeles Daily News.
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Source: https://www.espn.com/espn/feature/story/_/page/espnw-rousey161215/how-ronda-rousey-preparing-return-ufc-amanda-nunes
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