Ronda Rousey has claimed she was injured before every one of her UFC fights.
The women’s MMA pioneer revealed to talkSPORT that she hid several medical issues from the UFC during her tenure with the company as she feared she would be forced to retire.
2Rousey revealed she was concussed before her KO loss to HolmCredit: Getty
In the end, ‘Rowdy’s’ UFC career was cut short due to her long history of suffering concussions as an Olympic judoka.
Towards the back end of her MMA career, the 37-year-old revealed it got so bad that she got concussion symptoms almost every time she took a punch.
In 2015, she was on the receiving end of a vicious head-kick knockout from Holly Holm that made her re-evaluate her next steps.
Rousey claims she entered that fight heavily concussed, however, she also can’t remember a time she fought with a clean bill of health.
“I always went into every fight with some kind of injury,” she told the talkSPORT MMA YouTube channel ahead of the launch of her new book ‘Our Fight’.
“I’ve gone into fights before from having concussion symptoms after sparring. But I think that one was definitely the most severe [against Holly Holm].
“So it wasn’t like I got tagged in sparring and was seeing stars and had sensitivity to the light and had to lock myself in the locker room afterwards in the darkness to get over, that had happened before many of my fights.
“Before that fight [against Holm], I literally slipped down the stairs and knocked myself out.2Rousey also insists she had an MRSA infection before her stoppage loss to NunesCredit: Getty Images – Getty
“And that was definitely a much more severe concussion, much closer to the fight than I’d ever dealt with before.
“But Robbie Lawler had already pulled out of that card [UFC 193] and I had heard that they were trying to break an attendance record… I couldn’t pull out and leave Dana [White] hanging like that.
“I promised him that I would always be his girl, I would be the one that would show up and fight when everybody else pulled out.
“I never once turned down a fight, I never once pulled out of a fight and it’s not because I never had an injury it’s because I always fought anyway.”
Rousey then reeled off a long list of injuries she sustained during her illustrious career, including having nine stitches put in her foot after being bit by a pitbull before her MMA debut and fighting Sarah Kaufman with a dislocated elbow.
She remarked: “My first fight I went in with, nine stitches in my foot from getting bit by a pitbull two days before.
“It was not something out of the ordinary to be just like, ‘Oh well, I dislocated my elbow, I guess I’m going to have to start jabbing Sarah Kaufman three times in the face with my bad elbow.’
“The Julia Bud fight I dislocated by my AC joint, I had a grade two separation going into that one… I got an MRSA infection right before the [Amanda] Nunes [fight] and I was like, ‘Oh well, I guess I’m fine with MRSA’.
“I can’t think of one fight where there wasn’t something wrong with me. But that’s kind of the champion’s responsibility in my eyes.”You show up and you fight whenever you’re challenged. You’re at the top of the hill, you defend it.”