What You Can Learn About Success from UFC Legend Ronda Rousey
What You Can Learn About Success from UFC Legend Ronda Rousey
If I were putting together a list of the women on earth that I most admire, Ronda Rousey would be on it. After winning a silver medal in judo at the Olympics, Ronda Rousey moved on to the UFC. For a while, she wasn’t just a great female MMA star, she was arguably THE most exciting MMA fighter on the planet. Not only did she win her first 12 professional fights in a row and capture the first women’s championship in the UFC, she mauled everyone she fought until the end. During those 12 wins, only one fighter even made it out of the first round with her and even in that fight, she dominated it from start to finish:
Eventually, Rousey lost her title, which must have been hard, but no sweat off of her back, she moved on to TV and movie roles:
Then, she went into pro-wrestling and had a couple of great runs in the WWE, where she became a top draw and a women’s champ:
On top of all this, her net worth is now supposedly 14 million dollars, she married fellow UFC fighter Travis Brown and they bought a farm, had a kid, and have a second child on the way. So, Rousey is pretty, a legendary athlete, she’s had wild levels of success in multiple fields, she’s wealthy and she seems to have a great family life. In other words, this is someone who has risen to heights that very few human beings ever have or ever will.
That’s why it was so interesting to read her biography, Our Fight: A Memoir. Not only did she open up about what was going on behind the scenes, but she went into detail about things that weren’t necessarily all that flattering to her and other people close to her. The book offered what at least seems to be a pretty revealing look at who she is as a person, what her life was like, as well as some of the challenges. The realness of all that was what made it fascinating.
You see, all of us now live in an “Instagram world” where everyone wants to make it look like they have a perfect, amazing life. We’re encouraged to compare our own lives, warts and all, to other people’s highlight reels that we see online.
Well, here is someone who doesn’t just LOOK LIKE they’re living a highly successful life, they’ve reached the pinnacle of success and they’re willing to show you what it was really like, scars, ugly patches, and all. That’s valuable because it’s good to know what it really takes to get to the top while being reminded that all those people who look like they have perfect lives from the outside are struggling just like the rest of humanity.
With that in mind, what we’re going to do for the rest of this column is give some descriptions of Ronda Rousey’s life, followed by quotes from the book. If you’re like me, you’re going to say “wow” a few times between now and the end of this article.
So, who is Ronda Rousey?
Well, she grew up with verbal apraxia, which meant she needed a lot of speech therapy as a child to get her to the point where she talked normally. Her father? He broke his back, had a blood disorder that kept him from healing and was getting sicker and sicker. He chose to kill himself when she was 8 years old, which was naturally devastating to her. Her mom was a hard-charging former judo champ who loved her daughter but didn’t seem like the most emotionally nurturing woman in the world.
Still, Ronda Rousey got into judo early and made a lot of progress. She went away to train, and she wasn’t quite sure about where the hard training left off and what she called “abuse” began. She described constantly being belittled and sadistically being beaten black and blue by a coach who did things like deliberately throwing her into walls and tables for having a small amount of success grappling against him. She described it like so:
I still waiver between, “That was really f*cked up” and “But it worked.” Sometimes, life is about reconciling how two things can be in conflict but still true. Of course, this reflection and analysis is only possible with years of experience and even more years of distance.
In any case, after winning a silver medal at the Olympics, she’d had enough, and she decided to get into mixed martial arts. However, there were some problems with that. One, she didn’t have money or sponsors early on, so she had to work multiple jobs to make ends meet. More significantly, one of her knees was a mess and she’d already gotten dozens of concussions via judo. The baddest woman on the planet? She couldn’t take any kind of a decent shot to the head without seeing stars and having her thinking get a little confused:
Even when I was at my most dominant, if the other person touched me at all, it could be enough to give me spotted vision. I would get barely grazed and feel like I’d had my bell rung. My fingertips would tingle. My teeth would buzz. Just push through it, I told myself. I was embarrassed to admit the impact the tiniest taps were having. No one could know I was vulnerable. My seeming invincibility did a lot of the work for me, keeping my opponents on their toes. If they knew I was one solid strike away from hitting the canvas, it would make my job a million times harder… When it came to grappling and transitions, I could put everything together myself. But I have really upright posture as a judoka. I don’t change levels like a wrestler. My knees are bad, so I can’t really throw kicks or move backward.
Quite frankly, that sounds less like a description of a future champion and more like a description of someone who should have never started doing MMA in the first place. Still, she had a truly incredible career until she had a fight with Holly Holm.
The way she described it, every single thing that could go wrong before that fight went wrong. She had a huge dispute with her coach. Her mother made that public right before the fight. She was burnt out. She severely injured her knee. The incessant media demands from the UFC got in the way of her training camp. She had tremendous difficulty cutting weight for the fight. You name it and it went wrong.
All except for one thing. Rousey met her future husband during that time period and from the way she talks about him, pretty clearly, she still has those beautiful love chemicals flowing through her system when she thinks about him. But, what struck me was what she said about dating BEFORE Travis Browne:
It seems cliché because every story about someone finding love seems to start with “I wasn’t thinking about serious relationships…” But I wasn’t thinking about serious relationships. I had a career that was unrelatable to almost everyone on the planet and that consumed virtually all of my time and all of my energy. I had gone through a string of sh*tty boyfriends, and after a 0 percent success rate, I had basically given up on any sort of love life. The year before, I bought a house that could only fit me—a Venice Beach bungalow with a bedroom loft where the ceiling peaked at five foot seven—with the full intention of living alone forever. I had no room in my life, metaphorically or literally, for six-foot-seven Travis Browne.
I think a lot of us have been there, at least temporarily, during our lives, but you don’t expect to hear someone as famous and attractive as Ronda Rousey saying she had, “given up on any sort of love life.”
Still, she had that fight with Holly Holm. At the start of the fight, Holm, who had excellent striking, caught her with a hard shot that rang her bell, and she fought terribly the whole first round. Then, she lost via a highlight reel, head kick knockout in the 2nd round:
Suddenly, all of Rousey’s dreams of finishing her career undefeated in the UFC ended and she went from being talked about as one of the greatest of all-time, to being mocked and attacked by many of the fans she entertained. It was a brutal experience for her:
Then, on November 15, 2015, in Melbourne, Australia, it all came crashing down. The worst moment of the worst day of my life was broadcast worldwide. And afterward, for days, it was replayed over and over, on an almost inescapable loop. Everywhere I looked there it was. On TV. On social media. In news headlines. On people’s faces. I’m not sure which was worse: the looks of pity from people who care about me and didn’t know what to say, or the looks of smug satisfaction from people who can’t stand me, even when they’ve never met me. Imagine being asked about it, endlessly asked about it. By people who don’t know you, but who feel like they have a right—no, more than a right, a duty to ask. That moment dissected and discussed by millions of people who have never met you. Your worst enemies brought out to weigh in on it. People cheering about it, celebrating it, laughing about it. People tagging you in pictures with trolling comments almost a decade later. How do you come back from that? I could not yet comprehend the enormity of what had happened, but I felt it in every cell in my body. I had lost. But it wasn’t just that I had lost. I was still in my body, stuck here in some kind of state between hell and living. Dying would have meant all of this was over. Dying would feel better than this. I could hear noise in the hallway, laughter. I could hear an entire stadium of people cheering my defeat. Tens of thousands of people celebrating the worst moment of my life. It was the most intense pain and misery and embarrassment and shame I had ever felt. I wanted to kill myself. I wanted to swallow a bottle of painkillers, close my eyes, and end it. Across the room, pressed against the opposite wall, as if trying to shrink themselves into the corner, stood the half-dozen athletic men who made up my team. Sadness hung in the silence. They stood, some blinking back tears, heads lowered as if attending a funeral. Their eyes darted around the room, glancing at me, concerned but afraid to linger too long.
How did Rousey handle that loss? She stopped working out, got extremely depressed, and spent much of the year smoking pot. Rousey did have a comeback fight in which she admitted the whole camp went perfectly, but she still lost to Amanda Nunes and her MMA career was over.
Even though her career was done, Rousey still couldn’t get away from her failure:
A few weeks after my fight, Travis and I took a road trip. I was in desperate need of a change of scenery. No one was ever expecting us in the small rural towns we passed through. We didn’t even know where we were going to stop along the way. We had checked into a two-star motel, just off the interstate, for the night after driving all day. Flipping channels, we had landed on Tosh.0 as we lay in bed. I cuddled into the nook of Travis’s arm, my happy place, watching as host Daniel Tosh offered witty commentary on videos pulled from the Web. “That was more depressing than a Ronda Rousey comeback,” he quipped. The studio audience didn’t even laugh. They groaned. I turned off the TV and cried on Trav’s chest. I was literally a f*cking joke now. One that didn’t even land with the audience. And I couldn’t get away, not even in the middle of nowhere.
Still, Ronda Rousey persevered and while pregnant, she basically ripped her finger off on a TV show:
The cameras rolled. I pushed the boat door up. It opened. I stepped through. Just as I walked through the door, it teetered on the edge, but instead of tipping open, it slammed shut again, right down on my hand. The pain was immediate as I pulled my hand back. I could hear the internal back-and-forth playing out between my body and mind. “F*ck, that really hurt,” I said to myself. “Don’t be a p*ssy,” I replied. With a skill forged through my judo and MMA careers, I pushed the pain aside and went through the scene as if nothing had happened, delivering my lines without missing a beat, and throwing random things off the boat as the script called for. The director yelled cut, I looked down at my left hand. My middle finger was being held on by a thread of tendon and the latex glove covering it. Just below the top joint, my finger had been severed from my hand. I grabbed my hand to hold my finger on, then turned to the director. “You guys aren’t going to like this,” I said, my voice completely calm, “but my finger is off.” “What?” he replied. “My finger is no longer attached to my hand.” “What?!” a chorus of people in the general vicinity exclaimed. The reaction around me was equal parts disbelief and horror as I held up my hand. Several looked away in disgust. Sitting in the dark in the hospital after surgery, I couldn’t believe how selfish and careless I’d been. How f*cking stupid am I? I berated myself, racked with guilt. I got pregnant and all I was concerned about was about how I didn’t get enough time to d*ck around beforehand? I was more concerned about how cool I thought I’d be shooting action sequences while pregnant and not about how dangerous it would be for the baby? I’m already the worst f*cking mom ever to a clump of cells. How the hell am I going to take care of an actual human? The surgeon put me in a removable cast I could take off to finish filming, but it wasn’t until I saw the baby’s heartbeat on the screen a few days later that I felt any relief.
Although Rousey had a couple of good runs in the WWE, she didn’t particularly enjoy it. She felt, correctly, that women had mostly been treated like T&A in the WWE, were still treated as second-class citizens compared to the male wrestlers and the chaotic, unscripted nature of things really bothered her. You might think, “Wait, this is pro-wrestling. Isn’t everything scripted?” The winners and losers? Yes. But the promos? Who goes up against who? The matches themselves? Those could still be up in the air hours or even MINUTES before they happened.
Rousey also quite understandably, wasn’t particularly happy with the nature of the fans in the WWE either. Yes, many of them are diehards who love their favorite wrestlers, but there also wasn’t a lot of appreciation for what the wrestlers were going through to entertain them. For example, Rousey talked about a match where she literally had kendo sticks broken over her back. She talked about how painful it was and the welts on her back. Yet…
Another person leaned over the barricade, flicking me off. “F*ck you, Ronda!” There was an absolute unrestrained anger directed my way. It was so real in the face of everything else being fiction. Being in my hometown, in the venue where I set the record for fastest submission title defense in UFC history, made it even more personal. The crowd was peppered with signs saying things like “Ronda Go Home!” I was home. This was my hometown. What they really meant was they wanted me out of the business. I was bruised, blooded, and booed. I had just let myself get beaten with a kendo stick for their entertainment. I stared back at them, trying my best not to respond with “F*ck you too!”
Eventually, Rousey’s run with the WWE ended. Now, she’s living on a farm with her husband and kids:
She’s rich, famous, still pretty, and working on a graphic novel:
She’s also pregnant:
Her fighting days are over. No idea if she’ll ever be doing movies again. But it does seem like a “happy ever after moment” doesn’t it? Of course, as the saying goes:
If you ever find yourself feeling a little bad because things aren’t going your way, just remember that’s the way of the world. Even someone whose life seems as charmed and successful as Ronda Rousey isn’t having an easy time of it. Whether it’s me, you, or Ronda Rousey, we all have to pay a big price to get what we want in life. Don’t feel bad about that. Pay it gladly and get what you want out of life.