Ronda Rousey: Why it Had to Be Gina Carano For my Comeback Fight
Earlier this week, on Tuesday, Netflix and Jake Paul’s MVP announced that the two pioneers of women’s MMA, Ronda Rousey and Gina Carano, will be making their respective comebacks to headline Netflix’s first MMA event.
The biggest superfight in women’s combat sport history, which has been years in the making, is finally happening. It will be contested inside a hexagon cage on May 16 at the Intuit Dome in Los Angeles.
It will be a featherweight bout of 5 five-minute rounds, using 4-ounce gloves, under the unified rules of MMA.
After this superfight was announced, Ronda Rousey appeared on ESPN MMA’s SportsCenter and spoke about why it had to be Gina Carano for her comeback fight.
The former UFC women’s bantamweight queen recalled that when she was nine months pregnant, she came across a video of Carano giving an interview. At the time, “Conviction” had gained an unhealthy amount of weight, and that’s when the idea of how she could help the latter first struck her:
“I was nine months pregnant, and I saw a video of Gina Carano giving an interview, and she didn’t look good. She gained an unhealthy amount of weight, and my first thought was, ‘Oh my god, what can I do? What can I do to help?’ And the reason why I had that thought was because she’s the one woman, not only in MMA, that doesn’t owe me a damn thing but that I owe immensely. And I’m always trying to look out for what I could do for her.”
During the sitdown, “Rowdy” revealed that she had always wanted to fight Gina Carano, and now, at this stage in their lives, she believes they both need this fight. Hence, she was inspired to do this for “Conviction” and herself:
“When I was in a similar spot, when I was depressed and gave up on the world and inadvertently gave up on myself, what I needed was a goal and something to reignite my passion again. And I always said that Gina’s the one person that I would come back to fight for, and I thought, ‘You know what, she needs this. She needs this fight.’ And the more that I thought about it, I was like, ‘You know what? I need this. I really need this fight.”
Ronda Rousey approached Dana White first about her comeback fight against Gina Carano
Before heading to Netflix, Ronda Rousey originally pitched the Gina Carano comeback fight to her old boss, UFC CEO Dana White. However, it didn’t work out.
“And I reached out to Dana [White] and asked him if he would be interested in it. And it didn’t exactly work out with the UFC, but it led us to here today.”
Ronda Rousey added that she believes both she and Gina Carano “fought to fight each other” and finally, after overcoming every obstacle, this dream match, which once felt like a pipe dream, is coming to fruition:
“This has been in the making since I was pregnant, which is over a year ago. So it took a long time to get us here, and it’s such a long story… We fought for this. We fought to fight each other. And there were a lot of obstacles along the way. And I told her, ‘If I have to go out there and train you myself to fight me, I will.’ And we made it happen. We had to work together to overcome every obstacle to get here, and it’s really surreal because it’s been a secret for so long. I can’t believe I’m actually able to talk about it.”
Despite years of inactivity, cage rust does not bother the 39-year-old UFC Hall of Famer. She said:
“Whenever I get my hands on somebody, they never get up again. And I’ve never been better in that way.”
Check out Ronda Rousey’s comments below (0:23):
Ronda Rousey last competed in 2016, when she lost to Amanda Nunes at UFC 207. Gina Carano, on the other hand, has been inactive since her lone MMA loss, which came against Cris Cyborg in 2009.
