After all this time and all she’s been through, it seems like a lot of people still want to make Ronda Rousey into something she’s not.
This was made obvious all over again this week after Rousey made an emotional appearance on The Ellen Degeneres Show, where she said she had suicidal thoughts in the immediate aftermath of her loss to Holly Holm at UFC 193.
"Honestly, my thought in the medical room, I was sitting in the corner and was like, 'What am I anymore if I'm not this?' " Rousey said. "Literally sitting there thinking about killing myself. In that exact second, I'm like, 'I'm nothing. What do I do anymore? No one gives a s--t about me anymore without this.' "
It was powerful stuff. As Rousey’s quote landed in the public consciousness Tuesday afternoon, the reaction made it clear some observers continue to have trouble wrapping their minds around the idea of the former women’s bantamweight champion as an actual human being, rather than some thing they want her to be—a mighty star or a terrible coward, a powerful woman or an unstable wretch.
Right up to the moment of that knockout loss to Holm, I suppose you could forgive us all for losing a bit of perspective. During the two-and-a-half years Rousey spent as champion, the UFC never missed an opportunity to tell us she was essentially superhuman.
The fight company took pains to paint her as an iconoclast, a role model for little girls and a feminist icon. There had never been anyone like her in all of human history, color commentator Joe Rogan once told us during a particularly inspired bit of pre-fight hype (NSFW language). It was always an awkward fit, but the organization had pay-per-views to sell and myths to build.
Likewise, Rousey herself wanted to become big things. She wanted to be a movie star, an advertising spokesperson, a sex symbol and a magazine cover model. Because—as we were always sure to be reminded—she could accomplish anything she set her mind to, she checked most of those boxes in one manner or another.
Then she lost. Holm shattered Rousey’s veil of invincibility in the most emphatic fashion, making the previously indomitable champion look clumsy and unskilled on her feet through nearly two full rounds before ending her night and leveling her legend with a kick to the head.
After that, it was the naysayers’ turn to make Rousey into whatever they wanted and—weirdly, sadly—they seemed to want her to be ashamed. They wanted to paint her as a fraud and shape her into the punchline of a thousand Internet jokes (NSFW language).
As we get more distance from that fight, however, it seems like we should come to grips with the reality of what Rousey actually is: just a great fighter. Nothing more. Nothing less.
A great fighter is, in fact, all she’s ever been. It’s how she was raised. Competition made up her entire childhood and now, just a few weeks past her 29th birthday, it has swallowed up almost all of her adult life, too.
Thinking about it that way gives a glimpse into her comments to Degeneres. It was shocking to hear Rousey reveal such dark thoughts, but it also brings to mind many other dominant champions who suddenly suffer an unexpected calamity.
We’ve heard former welterweight champion Georges St-Pierre—as dominant a fighter as we’ve ever seen—say part of his reasoning for leaving the sport in 2013 was the emotional toll it took to walk the razor’s edge of being UFC champion. Just a couple of months ago we saw the leaked locker room footage of dethroned featherweight kingpin Jose Aldo as he collapsed, inconsolable at the edge of his workout mat after losing his title to Conor McGregor.
To hear and see Rousey react as she did doesn’t make her any less worthy than those other UFC legends—it just makes her more like them. It doesn’t make her pathetic or gutless.
It just makes her a dedicated athlete who now knows how it feels to lose everything she worked so hard to achieve.
Also—and it feels weird to have to say this—it just makes her human. If anything, perhaps Rousey's words were another reminder of the brutal nature of this sport, that it can take everything from you if you let it:
What we're seeing is someone who has invested much of her self-worth into her work, a young person trying to process her first, life-altering public setback.
Who can't empathize with that?
We have no reason to believe Rousey is still suicidal. In fact, it seems like quite the opposite. She seems set on trying to get her title back. Everything Ronda Rousey says is always a big deal, and that includes hearing her refer to these depressive thoughts in passing.
I’d even suggest this revelation fits into two things we’ve known about Rousey all along: First, that she can’t stomach the idea of losing.
Second, that she’s never going to mince words.
Rousey’s unflinching honesty has always been part of her curious celebrity. Much of her initial popularity both with her UFC bosses and the media came because she didn’t think twice before she spoke. She was honest about the damage she intended to inflict on her opponents, honest about the ones that rubbed her the wrong way and honest about the ups and downs of her fledgling stardom.
Now she’s just being honest about how it felt to live the lowest point of her professional life.
Those among us who can’t at least partially empathize with that maybe never cared about anything quite as much.
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