Ronda Rousey has revealed the heartbreak she felt after losing her bantamweight title to Holly Holm.
Rousey is widely recognized as one of the most prominent figures in mixed martial arts as she made a significant impact on the sport as a whole. During her prime, she enjoyed considerable success in the Octagon, where she defended her bantamweight crown a record six times before suffering a shock knockout defeat at the hands of Holm in November 2015.
Later, Rousey revealed how she contemplated dying by suicide because of her loss, and the trolling that it followed. During a recent Q&A, ‘Rowdy’ Ronda explained why nobody will understand how much that title meant to her.
“I cared about that title more than anybody ever has,” Rousey said at a Q&A during her recent book tour [as transcribed by MMA Fighting]. “It hurt me more than anybody that’s ever been hurt by losing it. That’s why I was able to defend so much for so long. It’s hard for a lot of people to understand, to have something mean that much to you. It’s like, ‘Why are you so upset? It’s just a fight.’ Well, it’s just somebody else’s fight to you, but I think one thing that’s really important if you’re going to be a fighter at an extremely high level, or an athlete, or someone who runs a business, or anything like that, you have to be willing to get your heart broken in order to put every fiber of your being into something. You’re going to know whether everything you have is good enough. I think that a lot of people have this tendency to preserve themselves and not put everything out there, and when it doesn’t work out, you’re like, ‘Well, it wasn’t everything I had, I could have done it if I gave it everything I had.’”
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