Ronda Rousey has been a busy woman lately. Since winning her title, she has signed on to play characters in the movies “The Expendables 3” and “Fast and Furious 7”, and she has been the coach of the popular reality television show “The Ultimate Fighter”. And that is not al! She is scheduled to have a re-match against her rival Meisha Tate on December 28.
Is all of the spotlight becoming too much for Rousey? She says that spending so much time in the gym while filming actually made her question her love for the sport.
“The gym is the place where I really center myself and I’m able to put the world into perspective and calm down,” she recently told the Bleacher Report. “When the cameras are on you nonstop, that changes. Even electrons change when they are watched constantly, and they really took my safe place and bastardized it to where I was dragging myself to the gym every day.
“They literally took my only safe place and made it something that I hated. I’m so thankful for being able to forge the relationships I did with my team, but you couldn’t pay me $10 million to do that again. There is just no way. By the end, I was questioning my love for the sport. I’m just happy to get back home to my environment and have my gym be my reprieve again instead of it being a stage.”
Even though Rousey has a potential movie career ahead, she isn’t letting that lead her away from her true passion and dream of growing the MMA sport to include more women, and that is why she decided to take the offer of coaching on the show.
“That is the only reason why I did The Ultimate Fighter,” Rousey told Bleacher Report. “From a professional and career standpoint, there were no reasons I needed to do that show. Zero. I didn’t need it at all, but I want the division to be stable. I want it to survive me and I want to have some sort of legacy in this sport.
“We needed to bring attention to all these girls who are so passionate and train so hard. They are valiant fighters and extremely passionate about what they do. They offer so much the guys don’t, and I thought it was something people really needed to see. I thought The Ultimate Fighter could provide that vessel where people could start getting interested in these other women coming up.”
The premiere of the new season of “The Ultimate Fighter” will air on Wednesday on the new Fox Sports 1 channel.
“I haven’t seen any of the footage yet, but I’m aware that I’m going to look nuts,” she said. “These kids that I’m responsible for have everything that is important in their lives on the line, and if that isn’t something important enough to care about and cry about, then I don’t know what is. I have no filter with my emotions, and people are going to see exactly what I’m feeling. I don’t think that is a bad thing.”
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