Rousey Speaks! Says She Won't Drop Edmond but Would Retire After Another Loss to Holm

Photo by Brandon Magnus/Zuffa LLC

It’s been nearly a month since Holly Holm knocked out Ronda Rousey at UFC 193 in Melbourne, Australia, and like a saint keeping vigil for her sanity, Rousey has been silent ever since. While Holm traveled the country appearing on talk shows and being feted with parades, Rousey, who spent the previous three years bathed in spotlight, disappeared, and wisely so. One couldn’t help but fill the gulf she left with questions about what it all meant, both the loss and the ensuing radio silence: Was Ronda Rousey done with the fight game, and was she done with fame and its inevitable backlash? But no matter how cynical Rousey might be now about the fickleness of fame and no matter how much she might lay some of the blame for her loss at the media’s feet, she has become over the years, has had to become, a great mass-media artist, a savvy master of timing and tone and press cycles. So we shouldn’t be surprised that just when it seemed like the post-fight collective social-media psychosis was finally dying down and we were getting back to our lives, Rousey would reappear to fill the void.

Today in a story in ESPN the Magazine Rousey finally answered the questions the world has been asking ever since her head hit the canvas on Nov. 14. Yes, she will be sticking with her coach, Edmond Tarverdyan, despite the criticisms of just about everyone in the fight world, including Rousey’s mother, AnnMaria De Mars, who believe he essentially and knowingly soft-pedaled his golden ticket into a mauling. De Mars told ESPN that “people,” meaning Tarverdyan, “let her down,” but Rousey, out of loyalty or belief or delusion or hope or something worse, disagrees. "Of course I'm staying [with Tarverdyan]," Rousey says. "That's my mom's opinion, not mine."

Though that news might be disappointing to Rousey fans who were holding out hope that she would be changing things up before her inevitable rematch with Holm, lest she face the exact same fate the second time around, it’s hardly surprising. What may be surprising, though, is Rousey’s admission that if she loses that rematch she’ll be done with MMA.

"Everything is going to be determined by that,” Rousey said. “Either I'll win and keep going or I won't and I'll be done with everything."

Who knows exactly what Rousey means by “everything,” whether she just means fighting in the UFC or if she means everything: the fighting, the movies, the press, the cameras, the spotlight, the interviews, the world. God knows the woman has more than enough money and more than enough cause if she wants to vanish for good, to go down to a ranch in Texas and hunt with her boyfriend and never come back. Who could blame her, after putting herself through the meat-grinder of American fame, after becoming a superhero and a symbol and a movie star and then getting dumped back down to earth and trampled by her former worshippers after one misstep?

Of course, the decision might not be hers to make. After her loss to Holm, Rousey’s air of invincibility was stripped away, leaving many fair-weather fans and many TV producers and movie executives (who are, by nature, fair-weather) without any vocabulary to speak about her with and without any way to sell her. True, now she has the former-champion-on-the-comeback-trail narrative in her corner, the Rocky story, and if she can make good on that there may still be a media image to salvage. After all, the movies love a redemption story almost as much as they love superheroes (anyway they used to). Another loss to Holm, however, and what is Rousey in the eyes of Hollywood but another temporary commodity, a star who burned for a hot second then was snuffed out? The history of Hollywood is lousy with those stories.

One can’t help but wonder if all this nonsense wasn’t on Rousey’s mind when she stepped into the cage last month, if the disease of American notoriety and marketability hadn’t fully infected her. Not that things necessarily would have turned out any different, but it makes you wonder about the limits of the human capacity to be heroic and symbolic and to mean something and, on top of all that, to be good at what you do all at the same time and all the time. From today’s interview it seems like Rousey isn’t just mourning her defeat in the cage but also coming to terms with the realization that no one can possibly do what she and the world were asking her to do.

"I feel like I'm grieving the death of the person who could've done that," Rousey said.

Check out these related stories:

Mix 'n' Match: Pairing Three Flawed Fighters with Perfect Coaches

Ronda Rousey's Defeat and the Psychology of a Comeback

Freddie Roach Has Tough Words for Ronda's Boxing, Uriah Hall Has Bizarre Words for Her Critics